


The Golden Sun and the Silver Moon

by Lumiera



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Earn Your Happy Ending, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghosts, Friendship, Gratuitous Alderaan, Growth of Trust, Mutual Pining, Mythology and Folklore, Recovery, Redemption, Romance, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Space Pomegranates, Visions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2018-12-21 03:19:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 141,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11935230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lumiera/pseuds/Lumiera
Summary: "How can you be so sure of what I'm meant for?"Padmé turned, river-swift, her mouth fixed in a firm line. "Because, Ben, there's always a choice. Always."* * *Something is blocking the ghost of Anakin Skywalker from reaching out to his grandson, but he refuses to stop trying. Kylo Ren thought himself beyond saving, but he's visited by two people who think differently: the man he'd murdered just hours ago—Ben had called him "Father", but Ben was dead—and a woman with flowers in her hair and sorrow in her eyes.Rey remembers nothing of her life before Jakku, but she's been dreaming of a place that feels like home. As she gets to know Luke, her strange, grief-laden new master who stays up all night to talk to ghosts, she realises that she already knows him—and that she's met the monster he calls "Ben" before.A post-TFA story of redemption, healing, coming home, and of two lonely people finding a place to belong.





	1. Panacea

They pulled him from the snow before the ground could swallow him whole.

Across the yawning chasm that stretched between them, fathoms deep, _she_ had whipped around, almost quick enough to miss. His neck had ached from the strain of keeping his head up and his gaze on her, but he’d watched her wide eyes watching him until he’d been half-blinded by the floodlights of a shuttle landing behind him. When he’d looked back, ice crystals clinging to the heavy fabric of his surcoat, she’d vanished into the thickets like a will-o’-the-wisp.

Allowing himself to think of the scavenger as anybody else—the tiny spitfire of a girl who’d been nicknamed _Sunshine_ once upon a time; who’d tugged at the too-short sleeves on a dead boy’s lanky arms and demanded that he tell her stories from a long-gone planet; who’d called that dead boy _Ben_ and asked where they were going as kaleidoscopes of nebulae gave way to arid deserts—would be treason, so Kylo Ren had only tightened his jaw at the retreating shape of her.

He couldn’t remember if he’d snarled and tried to shove away the group of stormtroopers and First Order officers sent to hoist him up from the crevasse’s edge. If he _had_ made a dogged attempt, hating that they could see him unmasked and bleeding, he’d have had a child’s grip on the Force, as unsteady as the wavering wingbeats of a fledgling bird. It had taken two men to carry him, and they’d heaved him onto a shuttle that broke atmo with a burst of fire chasing at its tail.

When he opened his eyes again to the glare of artificial light, out of the viewport, Starkiller Base was shrinking in on itself and then surging outwards, being reborn as a sun.

“Class II haemorrhaging,” a med-droid chirped from somewhere maddeningly out of his field of view, reciting his injuries as though he were a sputtering pile of malfunctioning parts that needed to be fixed. “Burn to the right side of the face, extending down to the clavicle. Large wound to the left flank. Trauma to the brachial plexus.”

The burn wound that travelled down the curve of his jaw sparked red-hot underneath his skin like a jagged line of exposed wires. It was close to numb for now, but as it healed pink and shiny, the pain would grow, turning sharp and shrill. Foggily, drifting in and out of awareness, he considered speaking up over the low drone of the shuttle’s engines, the pitchy, skittering thrum of anxiety, and the rapid chattering of officers around him—all asking each other _where does the Supreme Leader want us to take him_ and _where the pfassk is Dromund Kaas meant to be_ —to demand that no one touch it.

He could deepen his voice to a growl and insist that the medics on board clean it with dabs of antiseptic gel but leave it to scar, and they would fear him enough to listen. He could stand for the mirror to judge him and run the pad of a finger over the barely-there dip that it would leave in his flesh, mapping out its path from the bridge of his nose to where its comet trail fizzled out near his collarbone, and it would be a permanent reminder: _do not fail again; you are of no use if you fail._

 _She_ had narrowly missed his eye. His sight had been his first concern, but then as he’d fought with palms chilled raw in their gloves to sit up in the snow and watch her flee, his arm had trembled and collapsed under his weight. He’d had no need of strings of medical programming code to know that its weakness didn’t bode well for the branching networks of nerves nesting inside, and an experimental flex of his fingers had yielded nothing, not even the slightest twitch.

Would the Supreme Leader allow the medical staff to mend it, if it could be mended at all? Or would his master prefer to avoid wasting valuable training time coddling a damaged apprentice, finding it far easier to instruct them to remove the arm and replace it with cybernetics?

 _If I lose the arm, I’ll truly be a Skywalker,_ Kylo Ren thought dimly, picturing cold, whirring machinery hanging limp at his side, built with cords of wires and metal to replace ropes of tendons and bone. The sheer irony of it after fifteen years spent trying to run from the name—and that of Amidala, Organa, Solo, and all their legacies heaped high on his shoulders—almost made a wry smile tug at his lips until he remembered the burn that _she_ had marked him with.

 _Rey._ Once, a lifetime ago, she’d been no taller than his waist, with a smile so bright, she might have dyed the sun green with envy. Once, when they’d been young, she’d been Ben Organa’s friend, in the days before everything, before he’d had to do what he did—

Why was she a _scavenger,_ clothed in scraps? He’d demanded more than that for her—

No. No more of that. If the Supreme Leader found out—

Pain bolstered a Dark Side user’s focus. Hatred, too, but there was no hatred in him for her. The Supreme Leader had taught him so when he’d been little more than a gangly, big-eared boy with too-long legs; he’d leaned down from his stone throne and told him that if a Force user knew how, they could reach in on themselves and find the minuscule cracks that sang with soreness or siphon their rage out as if from a well, then send it pounding through their veins with their pulse, roaring in their bloodstream and rushing to their fingertips.

Kylo didn’t have enough energy left in him to order the medics to stop pumping him full to the brim with pain relief. He doubted that even _he_ could be so bull-headed.

A med-droid was extending its skinny metal limbs to place a patch soaked in sickly-sweet bacta gel over the bowcaster wound on his side, spreading a pleasant warmth over his clammy skin. With what hazy wisps of strength he still had before his vision ebbed away for the umpteenth time, Kylo Ren clenched the fist of his good arm until his knuckles throbbed and bloomed milk-white, imagining crumpling the droid into a lump of twisted mechanics. In his mind’s eye, gears and screws spilled out of the ruptured chassis like blood dripping on the ice.

As his fingers unfurled and splayed wide, a memory rose from somewhere hidden.

When he was five years old, Ben Organa had been upset; his parents had seemingly woken up that morning in a mood to bicker. They’d been rehashing the same fight until he could predict what would cause the flashover and make them start again. He’d stormed to the kitchen with their shouts reverberating in his ears, wrenched open a cabinet, seized a plate from a shelf, and hurled it down with a yell, wishing that he could pause time to see the exact moment it splintered down the middle and shattered into a dozen pieces.

 _(“Why are you being so stars-damned_ flippant?”

 _“Everything always_ has _to be about the fate of the galaxy with you, doesn’t it—”)_

Though he’d forgotten what they’d been arguing about, Kylo could almost hear the disappointed cadence of Leia Organa’s voice over the staccato chirping of holocomms and the steady humming of droids.

_(The plate split the air into fragments when it broke. His parents hurried into the kitchen, their argument temporarily thrown aside. Their coiled-tense shoulders deflated with long breaths as they saw him stood, scowling but unharmed._

_Leia took in the shards of smashed porcelain scattered inches away from his small, bare feet, then raised her head to look him in the eyes. “What did that solve, Ben?” she asked, not understanding. Her hurt tone was worse than a scolding. “Do you feel better now?”)_

That boy had hung his head and mumbled a _no_ to the floor, sudden shame thick and sour on his tongue, but that boy had been a weak, foolish child who had cried at skinned knees, cricked his neck hunching over storybooks, and strayed from his mother’s side to scour the banks of the Solleu River for pelikki eggs, starry-eyed with wonder, wanting to feel the fragile life beating inside before fumbling beaks chipped the thin blue shells apart. He was dead, just like the planet his mother had spent years yearning for, combing the constellations for the vast, home-sized gap that it had left in the very fibre of her being.

His sluggish thoughts wandered over to his mother— _no, not_ mother, _Leia Organa_ —thousands of light-years away from his escape shuttle sailing through the middle of nowhere, too far for her to reach for him and ask: _what did killing your father solve, Ben? Do you feel better now?_ He knew then that she’d survived. If she’d been killed, he’d have felt it in the webs of the Force; a gossamer thread stretched between them fraying in the centre and snapping in two, and the marrow-deep pang of it would have robbed the air from his lungs, sending him reeling and curling in on himself.

Kylo Ren wasn’t supposed to be thinking of that dead boy’s family. He wasn’t supposed to feel a secret thrill of relief shivering through him to know that the dead boy’s mother—the _enemy—_ still lived.

He was flooded with grief that was only half his own, and he refused to let himself feel any of it.

Letting out a pathetic growl that would have frightened nobody, Kylo screwed his eyes shut until phosphenes fizzed and fired behind his lids. When he opened them again and risked turning his head a fraction to the side, he realised that he must have gone mad, for Han Solo’s ghost was leaning against a durasteel wall with the surety of a man who had decided that he belonged there.

Han Solo’s body was cast in soft blue light, giving off an ever so faint glow that reminded Kylo of the tender way moonbeams kissed clouds’ linings silver. He was a perfect freeze-frame from Ben Organa’s childhood, like he’d been pieced together by someone who knew exactly what would make Kylo Ren’s chest ache: an untidy mop of dark hair framed an unlined face, and sleeves rolled up to his biceps showed dirt smudged to his elbows, no doubt from tinkering with the innards of the _Millennium Falcon._

Kylo Ren glared at the ghost, willing it away.

None of the officers had noticed the intruder. The medics were too busy bustling around him and discussing whether his arm could be saved to glance up.

Han Solo’s ghost tapped at the tip of his nose, swiping a luminous streak of dirt there. “I’m telling you, bandit, you can fix just about anything if you know how,” he said, and Kylo could almost _see_ his father giving a conspiratorial grin and a fond rap on the _Falcon_ ’s walls, as if to say _this is my_ other _firstborn._

 _Bandit._ The nickname was taken straight from years ago, stolen from another boy’s life. Han Solo had died by his blade hours ago—Kylo had gritted his teeth and pressed the activation button himself—and had turned to the same star-stuff that made up what remained of Alderaan and the Hosnian system, yet there he was. Kylo’s heart hammered a furious tattoo against his ribcage, drumming a booming timpani-beat in his temples as he darted his gaze about the room, overcome with the urge to scrabble at the sheets beneath him until he pressed himself against a wall, needing the ghost to _go away leave me alone I killed you you’re dead._

It would have been easy for him to assume that he was hallucinating, guilt-ridden and half-spaced on a cocktail of adrenaline and analgesics strong enough to knock out a wampa, if not for the fact that his—Ben Organa’s—father being there was not impossible. When he’d shed his old name and come to learn, the Supreme Leader had been generous. He’d preserved old literature and theoretical texts for his new apprentice to pore over, some of them bound books made of real paper, their spines dusty and their pages brittle and yellow with age. As he’d devoured them, reading until strung-together words unravelled and hazed into shoals of swimming symbols, he’d learned that a dead Force user, if powerful enough, could bend the rules, lend their energy, and allow a person not sensitive to the Force to take visible shape as a ghost.

Try as he might, Kylo couldn’t think of a Force user cruel enough to taunt him with Han Solo’s spectre. He could be certain that it was not his grandfather; Darth Vader would have wanted him to shrug off any and all trappings of the Light.

His train of thought was abruptly derailed by General Hux announcing himself in a flurry of clicking boot-heels.

“Strict orders from Leader Snoke are to ensure that Ren keeps the arm.” Hux gave a short sniff before he added, stressed for impact, “Through _any_ means necessary.”

Kylo’s eyebrows furrowed in a frown, stinging the tail end of his wound at the bridge of his nose. He had always _felt_ people and their emotions without trying—often, without _wanting_ to. He’d sense them as keenly as he might have done had he plunged in and plucked their feelings from their heads, forming a whirlwind of swirling colours and second-hand sounds at the back of his mind. Hux was projecting his scorn, musing none-too-quietly to himself that it would be far more efficient to amputate the arm, fit a cybernetic one in its place, and be done with the matter. If his treatment had been left up to Hux, Kylo knew that they’d have dragged him from where he lay in the snow and delivered him to Dromund Kaas without a drop of bacta.

By the wall, Han Solo eyed Hux with disgust curling up his lip.

_Why aren’t you looking at me the same way?_

It made no sense for Han to be there with him, of all people and places. Days later, when he arrived on Dromund Kaas, the Supreme Leader would scrutinise him and murmur aloud a truth that was already achingly clear: destroying Starkiller Base had been his father’s priority, while he’d been a mere afterthought. If Han hadn’t intercepted him by chance—if he hadn’t shouted that dead boy’s name across the walkway and made Kylo’s footsteps grind to a halt—he would have allowed him to die as the base exploded. _When he gets what he wants, he’ll crush you,_ Han had insisted, yet Han would have done the same to him. He would have abandoned him there with no warning but the tremors of the Force whispering _danger, danger_ in his ears.

His eyelids grew more and more leaden. When Kylo Ren slipped into sleep at last, it was out of a stubborn refusal to meet the ghost’s gaze.

_(Supreme Leader Snoke reclined on his throne, surrounded by a tangle of thorned vines. Spidery finger-bones protruded from his pale hands with every flex or tense, and for a moment, it seemed as though he was frail enough to take and crumple into shreds like a winter’s leaf. “What do we do with things that have outlived their use, Kylo Ren?” he asked, in a voice that creaked like old tree branches._

_“We destroy them, Supreme Leader,” Kylo Ren replied, as he’d been trained.)_

 

* * *

 

On her first night on Ahch-To, Rey woke with a scream tearing from her throat.

She jolted up in a blind panic, her fists balled vice-tight in the blankets of her pallet. Loose strands of damp hair clung to her sweat-soaked forehead as she searched her little beehive hut with a scavenger’s wary eyes, her heartbeat thrumming as fast as a skittermouse’s—so quick, one could feel it jumping against the pad of their thumb underneath the velvety fur and fear that it was about to burst open. Pain shot down the length of her right arm, her clavicle, and her cheek, as though somebody had taken a match to her skin while she slept and set her aflame.

In a whirl of roughspun robes, Luke Skywalker rushed in. His wind-beaten face blanched white with worry at the sight of her sat gasping for breath and clutching at her upper arm.

As Luke lowered himself to kneel in front of her, Rey scanned the dusky shadows daubed under his eyes and found herself doubting that he’d slept that night. Earlier, when she’d murmured _goodnight_ to him, she’d lingered by her hut’s arched entryway to watch him walk to the craggy edge of a cliff and sit like a lotus flower, unfurling under the sprawling canopy of pinprick stars. The curious sensation of eavesdropping on something private had shimmied up her spine, and as she’d turned away, though they were alone on the island, the almost musical rustling of soft, unrecognisable voices had floated towards her.

“It’s all right, Rey,” Luke soothed. “Where does it hurt?”

“This pain isn’t—it’s not mine,” Rey choked out.

She could see and feel what _he_ saw and felt. In the seconds before she’d lurched awake, _his_ face had swum before her, reflected in mirrorglass, an angry red slash ripping down a jawline dotted with tiny moles and freckles. For a sliver of a moment, she’d seen a fist-sized blast wound shaped like a rupturing sun, etched on an abdomen strewn with scars. The briny scent of the ocean had left her, and in its place, there had been the sweetness of bacta, the sharpness of rust, and the smell of ozone, which reminded her of sparks hissing from hot metal. The worst of the blaze in her nerves burned at the pulse point by the jut of her collarbone, right over where a bacta patch lay on Kylo Ren’s pale flesh.

Pushing those images as far away as she could, she ground her teeth together and gritted out, “I want him _out_ of my _head.”_

Luke’s greying eyebrows knit, a small vertical line pulling between them. “I don’t think that’s possible.” Tentatively, he lifted his flesh-and-blood hand in a silent gesture of asking permission. When she didn’t flinch from him, he hovered his palm a hairsbreadth above her aching shoulder and the pain vanished as though chased away. As she gulped down a series of greedy, relieved breaths, he explained, “Just a basic shield. I can’t keep it up for long, but—” He broke off, and his next words sent icy tendrils of dread snaking through her gut. “I think you and Ben are bonded by the Force, but I don’t know much about bonds of that nature. The only ones I know of are those forged on purpose between a master and their apprentice, and this… seems far stronger.”

Rey met his serious gaze and embarrassed herself by letting out an involuntary sob. Luke had the decency to glance away while she cursed herself and dried her eyes with her sleeves, and for that, she was grateful.

To an outsider, Jakku was a barren wasteland with nothing but death lurking in its dunes, but to Rey, it had teemed with stories that lived as she did, alive with myths of a goddess named R’iia, who made her bed out of clouds and exhaled storms in her fury; hushed rumours of how Jakku had once been lush and green, covered with wells and springs and streams that babbled as they flowed; and legends of the past, when the Jedi had been more than just whispers. When she’d been younger, she’d sat around a crackling campfire with a dozen others, locals and star-hoppers alike, and she’d listened to warbled songs and tales, enchanted by the vivid pictures they painted in her mind. Some of those stories had been of Luke, and she’d imagined him as he’d been portrayed in his myths: a hope-filled golden boy with hair of spun sunlight.

The Luke she’d come face to face with on Ahch-To was at once the same as the legends she’d heard and worlds apart from them. The galaxy’s last hope was a weary-eyed man whose hands had trembled as he’d reached out to take Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber from her, and he’d turned it over and over in his grip as though relearning its every contour before passing it back to her. In a voice that hadn’t been as cracked from disuse as she’d expected, he’d told her _this is yours now, Rey._ She hadn’t thought to question how it was that he knew her name—perhaps it was the Force—and when she’d finished tapping out a message to Leia to tell her that she’d arrived safely, she’d fallen asleep with the intention of deciphering Luke in the morning.

“Come outside,” Luke said gently, powerless to sever the invisible ties that linked her and Kylo Ren. “I’ll make you some tea and something warm to eat.”

Rey braced herself, stood, and followed Luke out of her hut on weak and unsteady legs, absently wondering if Kylo Ren could feel it; if somewhere crawling through the never-ending coldness of space, his legs were wavering beneath him.

Outside her hut and under the skies, she needed no lantern. Moonglow bathed everything for as far as the eye could see in silver, illuminating ocean waves that rippled and danced as they crashed against the rocks at the bottoms of cliffs. The stars shone so clear above her, she could trace them with her gaze and braid together constellations, as she’d done during sleepless nights on Jakku—here an archer with their bow drawn, there an arrow firing off into the sea, then a bird with its vast wings spread as though about to take flight, and a gigantic ladle large enough to pluck a planet from where it perched and feed it to her.

While Rey sat in the grass next to Luke’s unlit campfire, which was made up of bundled logs and ringed with layers of smooth stones, he set about pouring water from a jug into a kettle hung over the fire. Without speaking a word, he sliced up a dead, glittery-scaled creature that Rey somehow knew was called a _fish_ , then placed the pink meat on a grill next to the kettle.

He passed his hand over the logs and a flame whooshed into life, casting them both in flickering golden light. Rey leaned forwards, inhaling the crisp scent of woodsmoke and trying her best not to gape. For the first time since she’d learned that she could use it, she found herself truly _wanting_ the Force; wanting to discover more about the strange, ethereal thing blooming inside her.

When the kettle let out a tinny whistle and puffed spirals of steam from its spout, Luke took two mugs and tipped heaped spoonfuls of fine orange powder into them before adding the boiling water. He stirred the mixtures without touching them, hovering a finger above each mug’s rim in turn and drawing slow, thoughtful circles in the air. “H’kak bean tea,” he told her, pushing a mug into her waiting hands once it had cooled enough. “It’s a traditional drink from Tatooine, my homeworld. They say it’s meant to be relaxing.” Returning to the fire, he flipped the sizzling fish over, then glanced up at her and gave a wistful half-smile. “I hope you can brave my cooking. It’s been a while since I’ve fed anyone but seabirds, and they’ll eat anything.”

 _If I can manage to choke down tasteless rations and leathery bloggins, anything Luke Skywalker cooks for me might as well be a delicacy,_ Rey thought, thinking of the feathery avian creatures she’d hunted and eaten on Jakku, when stubborn hunger had gnawed her stomach raw even after she’d wolfed down a quarter portion. Bloggins were almost too easy to catch—some scavengers had joked that they allowed themselves to get caught—and skittermice had never been worth the effort; they were blink-quick, darting away across the dunes in an instant or burrowing under the sand when threatened. Everyone in the Goazon Badlands had known not to provoke steelpeckers if they valued their lives.

It had never occurred to Rey to _feed_ a creature. To her, it seemed like an activity for the full-bellied, like Luke Skywalker with his oceanful of fish.

She eyed his H’kak bean tea with doubt—it was the brightest beverage she’d ever come across; the exact rusty orange of a sinking sun—and took a sip, wrinkling up her nose. “Oh!” she blurted out as she tasted it, sweet and warm on her tongue. “It’s _good!”_

Luke’s lips twitched as though fighting back a smile. He lifted some slices of browned fish with the Force and dropped them onto a small wooden plate, which he handed over to her. She rested her mug in the grass and dug in at once, ignoring the knife he’d offered.

On Jakku, there had been richer, better-fed merchant families who had settled around Niima Outpost, making their living through trading with spacefarers. She remembered how the smell of cooking meat had drifted from their massive tents, and how her dry mouth had watered as she’d passed them on her way to exchange salvage for polystarch rations, and how she’d wished on shooting stars that perhaps one of them would invite her inside for a meal. Her mind had gone wild with lust, imagining everything that she’d get to eat and drink: earthy rainbows of spices; melt-in-the-mouth bread swiped with creamy butter; golden pastries filled with jam; never-ending cups of water; and fruits that would burst with flavour as she’d pierce their skins with her teeth.

In those impossible daydreams, she’d eaten slowly and made each mouthful last, wanting to make the meal stretch on for as long as it could. As she restrained herself from devouring her fish and instructed herself to savour each bite instead, Luke regarded her, an odd sadness glimmering in his pale eyes. Before she could consider it, he snuffed it out and buried it somewhere dark and deep within him.

Out of nowhere, he asked, “Where was your desert?”

“Jakku,” Rey answered after swallowing the last of the fish, then narrowed her eyes. “How do you know I’m from a desert?”

“Jakku,” Luke repeated, so softly, she had to strain to hear him over the distant roaring of the sea and the popping of burning wood. “I sensed impressions of you through the Force. You feel like sand and sunlight, just like how Tatooine always felt when I used to visit.” He gave her a welcoming smile that clashed with the way his grip had tightened around his mug, bleaching his flesh-and-blood knuckles white as bone. “Try it,” he told her. “It can be the first thing I teach you.”

Her eyes fluttering shut, Rey reached out, focusing past a cacophony of countless pattering heartbeats and coloured threads that ran between her and every living thing around the archipelago, shuddering like flapping wings for birds and swaying from side to side like fishtails. Luke’s signature in the Force was a gentle cornflower blue, steady as still water, and he felt like the heady bliss of soaring up and up until breaking atmo, a pair of suns, crystal prisms scattering technicolour light about a room, sea-salt, and the trilling notes of birdsong. Yet, there was something else; something nostalgic and familiar, as though she’d met him before.

She couldn’t have, of course. Her family had left her on Jakku when she’d been young, and though she couldn’t remember their faces, their names, or where they were from, she remembered the dimmest echo of a man’s voice vowing, _I’ll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise._

Luke had always been a myth.

So why did he feel so familiar?

“We had a saying on Tatooine,” he went on, “about how you can leave your desert, but your desert will never truly leave you. You’ll always find yourself wanting more: more adventures beyond your dusty little rock, and more answers that you won’t find written in the sand.” Gauzy curls of steam rose from his mug to shroud his face, and a heavy sigh shook his shoulders. “You have a lot of questions,” he said; not a question but a statement, as though he’d seen into her and watched the cogs and gears in her mind working. “I’ll do what I can to answer them for you. I’m not going to lie or mislead you with half-truths and non-answers.”

Rey took him in, desperately searching for clues—something, _anything._ “I…” she began, faltering, “I know you, don’t I?”

Luke shut his eyes and inhaled. “You knew me,” he replied, a small, sad smile curving up his lips. “You were one of my students.” He opened his eyes, saw that she’d frozen in anticipation of more, and continued, “When the war ended, I was the last Jedi left. I wanted to rebuild the Jedi Order and make right the things I believed they’d done wrong, so I started a praxeum on a planet named Nysa. You were brought to me when you were three years old.”

She could almost _see_ Nysa unfolding in front of her as he spoke, a shimmering hologram pressed over the night: a green planet dotted with winding lakes and lush meadows that overflowed with more flowers than she’d thought the universe could hold. Vaguely, as though submerged in a waking dream, she saw insects with stained-glass wings crawling up tall blades of grass, and a library with terracotta walls, packed with more holobooks than a person could read in a decade.

It felt _right,_ and her heart yearned for it; for the fragrant meadows and the woods carpeted in cream-petalled, yellow-trumpeted flowers; for the coolness of lakewater lapping at her ankles.

“And then Kylo Ren killed everybody?” Rey murmured, hardly daring to speak any louder. There was an old belief on Jakku that to speak a thing aloud made it so, whether it was a wish, a jinx, or a prediction, and though she’d shook her head and smiled at the thought, it seemed almost too real to her now.

“No,” Luke said quietly, “no one died.”

Rey furrowed her eyebrows. “Then what happened if no one died?”

 _“Snoke,”_ he whispered, as though the name was a curse. “He was interested in Ben from the moment he was born, maybe even before that. Any child in the galaxy born of Ben’s lineage—any child born like Ben—would have had a huge target on their back, which Snoke couldn’t resist.” Gazing out to the cliffs, Luke stared at the oblivious moon glowing down upon them, his eyes glistening. When he carried on, there was a practiced, measured tone to his speech, though it sounded in danger of growing fault lines and breaking apart. “Even if Ben fought with all his might, he still lost. He was fourteen when I… I went off-planet, unknowingly, _stupidly,_ giving Snoke the chance to persuade Ben to lower the shields around Nysa and allow his men in. What happened next... some call my nephew ‘Jedi Killer’ for it.”

As she listened with bated breath, needing to know how the Jedi Praxeum had been destroyed and how she’d ended up on Jakku, Rey couldn’t help but think that Luke seemed impossibly tired. He had to have been out on Ahch-To with no company but his seabirds and his strange, soft voices for R’iia-knew-how-long. Had they ever rustled to him, in their voices made of all things incomprehensible, that he couldn’t have known that Snoke would attack while he was gone?

“Some people have a rare ability: they can take the Force from others.” He sensed her confusion eddying around them—how it was that something as otherworldly as the Force could be _taken_ like a material thing—and explained, “Everything is connected in the Force. Think of it as like a candle flame, and when you sever a person’s connection to the Force, you snuff out that flame, leaving only smoke behind. Those who agreed to join Ben joined the Knights of Ren, and those who refused had their ability to use the Force stolen from them. All but one.” Luke looked directly at her, his eyelids rimmed in a washed-out red. “You were five, and I can’t imagine that Snoke would have had much use for someone so young. Whatever Snoke wanted, Ben ignored it. He took a ship and vanished with you.”

Tears pricked at Rey’s eyes despite her attempts to blink them away. “He couldn’t kill me himself, so he decided that he’d take the coward’s way out and leave me to _starve_ to death?”

Luke shook his head slowly, the amber firelight casting dancing shadows over his lined face. “No,” he replied. “Ben was— _is_ —impulsive and reckless, but he wouldn’t have wanted you dead, not ever. If I know him, he thought he was saving you from Snoke. Before you, he’d been the youngest of my students, sent to me at eleven years old, while the others were already in their late teens. Some of my padawans called you his ‘duckling’—wherever he would go, you’d follow.” He took a ragged inhale, then asked, “You don’t remember anything of what happened, do you?”

Her lips moved to shape a _no,_ but no noise would come out. Kylo Ren had ruined everything that Luke had been creating, hurt Finn, and killed Han Solo, yet he was supposed to have been her _friend._

Something feather-light and so very careful brushed against her mind. “He blocked your memories,” Luke told her with a frown. “If you’d learned about what happened on Nysa or about the Force—that you were capable of using it—Snoke would have looked for you. That’s as much as I know. Ben is the only one who can give your memories back; the rest is going to have to come from him.”

“Why did you never come to get me?” Rey demanded once words had unjammed in her throat, tears spilling forth at last. Swallowing a sob, she hurriedly rubbed at her eyes, tasting salt on her tongue. “Did you—did you even know I was on Jakku at all?”

“I couldn’t—you were gone—” Luke’s voice cracked, and something in Rey’s chest twinged hard enough to hurt. Luke Skywalker was near tears for _her._ “You were gone, and Ben was gone, and all my padawans were gone—” He broke off, struggling to compose himself, his cybernetic fingers tapping an anxious drumbeat against the side of his mug. “It was as if you’d both disappeared. I could feel my padawans fleeing to their homes, but nothing of you or Ben. I’m so, so sorry, Rey. If I’d not left—if I’d just been able to feel you—if I’d known a rough estimate of where you’d be, I’d—”

Through her tears, Rey interrupted him. “Do you hate him? Ky—Ben?”

Luke’s lips twitched. “Hate him?” he echoed softly. “No, I don’t hate him, nor could I ever.”

Before Rey could ask _but how could you_ not _hate him after all he’s done to you and Han and Leia,_ Luke wafted his hand over the fire, which had dwindled to just a few slender, quivering flames. At his silent command, it surged to life and bathed her in warmth, and it was then that she noticed that she’d started to shiver.

“Afterwards, I feared myself and what I might be capable of,” he admitted, more to the fire than to her. “I felt an immense disturbance—a wound, torn in the fabric of the Force. When I returned to Nysa, the area around my Praxeum was… corrupted. There’s no other way to describe it.” The flames died out for a split-second, as though they themselves had been ripped down the middle. “I could feel the sheer terror and the rage, and the longer I stayed there, the more I could feel myself being corrupted. I put out the fires they’d set to burn it all to the ground, then left, searching for the first Jedi Temple.” Lifting his head, Luke looked past their beehive huts, past hundreds of worn, winding steps, and up at a building made of half-crumbled stone. “I wanted to find out if there was a way to restore the Force to those it had been taken from.”

“ _Is_ there a way?”

“It’s possible,” Luke answered, fragile hope swelling in his eyes, “but like your memories, Ben needs to be the one to do it.”

He had faith in Kylo Ren, she realised, just as Leia did, and like Han had before his own son had murdered him. Rey thought then of her own family, whoever they were, and how she’d spent her time on Jakku trusting with every last inch of her that they would be coming back for her. She’d watched the skies for ships, tracking each one until it landed, foolish disappointment flickering behind her ribs when the people climbing off the ramp didn’t look like they’d be hers.

It had all been a lie. A lie told to protect her, if that could be believed, but a lie nonetheless.

Rey reached up, tugged on a bun, and wrestled it from its tie. “I—I styled my hair like this so that my family would find me,” she said, voice small. With shaky hands, she undid the remaining two and slipped the ties on her wrist, combing her waves of hair free with her fingers. “So they’d see a girl with three funny buns and know that I was _theirs._ But now—now they’re never going to find me, are they? Not when they weren’t the ones who left me on Jakku?”

Luke made a low, sorrowful noise. He shrugged off his cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders, a comforting gesture that felt both new and old, brought from her life _before_ and given to her in the _after._ The heavy material was the kind that would have fetched a fortune in portions on Jakku if she’d come across it in a wreck, and once she clasped it tight around her, her shivers died down into nothing.

As she clutched Luke’s cloak, she inhaled the scent of the sea. It smelled like _home,_ somehow. “Who brought me to you?” she asked. “Did I remember anything from before?”

“An older woman,” Luke replied, in the halting manner of a person trying to remember, “who pleaded with me to take you in, even though I’d never planned on training young children. I couldn’t get her to say much, and all I could feel from her was fire and ringing bells. I didn’t understand. I still don’t.” A faraway gleam shone in his eyes, caught up in memories too dim for her to make out. “You didn’t remember anything, but you had nightmares about smoke and fire; the same ones over and over.” He pressed his lips together, then added gently, “I wish I could give you more. I know how it feels.”

Rey nodded, staring down at her hands and willing her eyes to dry. “I think… I think I need some time to process everything,” she mumbled after a pause, focusing on the ties around her wrist and her scruffy, bitten fingernails.

“We’ll start our training when you’ve rested.” Luke made a snap-fast pinching gesture and the campfire extinguished itself with a hiss, taking its heat and leaping yellow-gold light with it. “Get a good night’s sleep if you can.”

Getting to her feet, she unwound Luke’s cloak from her shoulders and passed it back to him. Without it and the glow of the fire to warm her, the wind’s whipping chill made gooseflesh creep over her skin, crawling up her forearms and prickling at the nape of her neck. “Thank you, Master,” she said, guessing that he would want to be called _Master_ from then on, like the Jedi of ages past had in the legends she’d heard.

Luke flinched as though struck. “Just Luke will do.”

“Right.” A corner of Rey’s mouth quirked up. “Well, I’m just Rey.”

“Just Luke and Just Rey,” Luke repeated as he heaved himself up, a faint smile playing on his lips. “We’re an odd pair, aren’t we?”

On her way to the little hut that she’d chosen as her own, Rey turned back, remaining in place for a moment. Peering up, she mapped out her constellations—her archer wore a belt fashioned out of three brilliant stars linked together like a string of pearls—and then watched the hems of Luke’s robes sweeping over the moonlit grass as he tidied away his cooking equipment. Despite herself and everything she’d learned, she smiled: she was going to grow to like Luke Skywalker for the second time.

Once she’d crawled underneath the blankets of her pallet and cocooned herself in them against the cold, vowing to gather bundles of dried wood for her hut’s stone hearth come the morning, her thoughts drifted to her family. Kylo Ren hadn’t taken them from her when he’d sealed away her memories of the Jedi Praxeum; she’d lost them somewhere in ringing bells and fire, and now she had no faces to give them, and no way of knowing if she had her mother’s laugh or her father’s eyes.

Rey held herself, wondering what had happened to them, if they were still alive, and if they’d loved her.

Amidst the hazy, star-specked mist that swirled in her mind before she fell into waiting dreams, she thought of ocean spray and soft voices crooning songs; of the chiming of bells and delicate silver blossoms floating in the breeze.

 

* * *

 

It took five nights for Rey to be able to hear Luke’s mysterious voices without them being swallowed up by the wind and the waves.

There were four speakers, she’d thought, two men and two women. Blessedly, she’d felt nothing of Kylo Ren since the night she’d awoken screaming, and so she’d kept still and soundless, waiting. Sometimes, only one of them would visit, and other times, all four would be out by the cliffs, murmuring with Luke until predawn painted the sky a stormy lilac.

One of the men felt like sorrow and footprints carving a path through sand dunes, and he had a refined accent she recognised as Coruscanti from some of the traders who’d come to Niima Outpost. He’d bickered with the second man—who was younger, brasher, and made up of solar flares and the same twin suns as Luke—every night since the first time she’d heard them, but there was never any malice woven into their verbal sparring. Rey had discovered that she liked to listen to the women the most, letting them lull her asleep: one was older, wiser, calm and gentle as running water; the other was lovely like a melody, and with her came fleeting images of white flowers braided into cascading curls of hair.

The next morning, as Luke supervised her attempts at using the Force to tear branches from dead trees to use as kindling, she’d come close to asking him about his secret guests, but she’d been stopped in her tracks by the rumbling of the _Millennium Falcon_ landing by the shore. Chewbacca had returned from D’Qar, and as she and Luke had approached, he’d given her two gifts.

The first gift—and perhaps the most precious—was that Finn had woken up, and that news alone had sent her pulling Chewie to her for a hug, whispering _thank you_ over and over as his long fur tickled her nose.

 _Big Deal was asking for you, Little Star,_ he’d rumbled. While she’d beamed until her cheeks hurt, her heart soaring to think of Finn recovering from his wounds, he’d added that the Resistance were relocating to a planet named Alinor, fearing that the D’Qar base and the Ileenium system were compromised. She’d like Alinor, he’d told her in his gruff Shyriiwook, describing ranges of snow-capped mountains, crystal-clear lakes, and forests peppered with fluorescent trees and swathed in endless seas of blue flowers.

Her second gift was from Leia Organa, who’d been so kind to her on D’Qar. Chewie had fetched it from the _Falcon,_ a package wrapped in crisp brown paper and tied with string, just like a present any other person would receive for their birthday. Even on Jakku, she’d known when her birthday was—a day that spacefarers called a _solstice_ , in the middle of the summer of the standard year for many planets—but she couldn’t remember ever being given a real present before. She’d hesitated to open it, feeling the weight of the parcel in her hands and treasuring the mere thought of somebody picking something to give to her, no matter what it was.

When she’d cut the string and peeled away the layers of paper, she’d been met with a plush fleece-lined jacket in a pretty, mossy shade of green, as though Leia had somehow known the precise colour that had enchanted her on Takodana. Gasping at how it fit like it was made for her and for her alone, she’d traced the neat stitches that _had_ to have been made by hand, not by any machine. It was perfect for Ahch-To’s blustery evenings and for a girl used to the desert sun beating down on her and bronzing her skin, and she’d fallen in love with it as she’d run her fingers over the soft sleeves, wondering how she could possibly repay Leia’s generosity.

Three days had passed since then, and Rey had taken the jacket off only to sleep and to bathe in a secluded sea cave she’d found.

True to his word, Luke had started to train her, though he hadn’t once ignited his lightsaber or told her to use hers. Yesterday, he’d had her concentrating until she could lift sea glass pebbles and arrange them into stacked towers that rose as high as her hips, spilling luminous pools of turquoise and teal on the sand when hit by the thin shafts of sunlight that peeked through the clouds. Today, she was supposed to be using the Force to persuade fish to swim in and out of Luke’s nets.

As it turned out, fish were more stubborn than she’d expected.

“Come _on_ ,” Rey muttered as a fish darted away before it could swim into the net, leaving a stream of bubbles behind.

Crouching by the shore, she trailed her fingers in the seafoam, admiring the glittering silver-blue scales of the few fish brave enough to come near her. Luke had told her that they would soon depart for Alinor, saying in an undertone something about having to face the music, and she couldn’t wait to see Finn and tell him how _alive_ everything was on Ahch-To. She’d tell him about how she’d learned the species of the native birds, from the stubby puffins to the albatrosses with huge wings so like the constellation of the bird taking flight that she’d formed on her first night; how she could tell them apart by their calls; how she’d discovered that fish were slimy to the touch; and about the rock pools with their odd spiny creatures and their little animals shaped like stars.

She was pulled from her reverie by Luke’s voice in her head, calling for her. Strange as it felt, she’d grown used to him: he never pushed and never tried to take what wasn’t his to take, though he had a curious gaze that seemed as though he could see right into her, examining all the things that made her up. When she stood, hastily wiped her hands on her legging-clad thighs, and clambered up the old stone steps that led up from the beachfront to find him, he’d already lit his campfire and was sprinkling seasoning over a sizzling brown fish.

Rey sat in the grass, watching the fire sway and shoot as it licked at the grill. “You never really talk about him,” she said, her mouth watering as the smell of cooking meat smothered in herbs and spices wafted towards her. When Luke glanced up, flame-lit golden-skinned, she swallowed her nerves and clarified, “Ben.”

Luke’s welcoming smile fell. “It hurts to,” he replied, in a voice that was barely above a whisper. He looked away over the cliffs at the gathering clouds and thinned his lips into a bloodless line, but before Rey could babble out an apology for bringing it up, he went on, “It hurts knowing that I went so wrong, and that my nephew is making so many mistakes in the name of a man who wants him to come home as much as I do.” A wry smile curved up his mouth. “That’s not to say that it stops me from talking about everything. You’ve heard me at night, haven’t you?”

“You… your voices?”

Making an affirmative noise, Luke nodded. “They’ve kept me company. Stopped me from going completely mad out here, anyway.”

“Who are _they?_ We’re alone on this island, aren’t we?”

“Ghosts,” Luke said, his tone matter-of-fact, as though there was nothing out of the ordinary in announcing that ghosts existed. “Obi-Wan Kenobi, a man I once knew. My father, Anakin Skywalker, though I expect you’ll know him better as Darth Vader.” Bending his head, he lifted the fish from the grill and began slicing it up, giving her several moments to take in what he’d told her, then continued, still cutting the meat, “The other two… well, I _thought_ that only those who could use the Force could appear as ghosts, but my father decided that I needed to meet them.” A curtain of breeze-tangled greying hair obscured his face while he worked, but he sounded like he was smiling. “My mother, Padmé Amidala, and my grandmother, Shmi Skywalker.”

When Rey blinked, she saw them in her mind, so vivid and bright, they could have been sat with her and Luke. There they were, illuminated by the sun and the flickering flames: fox-gold hair and a worn smile, then delicate features and a gown made from lakewater and rain, then the fierce eyes of a man with the desert in his veins, then a kind face and callused hands. They were all so clear—so _real_ —she almost felt homesick for them when she opened her eyes and they faded away.

“I told you not long ago that I wanted to make things right, didn’t I?” Luke prompted, placing a mug of his favourite H’kak bean tea and a plate piled high with spiced fish in front of her. “The Jedi Order were… rigid, to say the least. Children were taken from their families and attachments were forbidden. It seemed to me that I could—that I could do better, somehow, that I could avoid making the same mistakes that caused my father so much pain, because of course, he and my mother had to keep their love a secret. I wanted to do it right.” He let out a harsh exhale and said with feeling, “I _failed.”_

“You didn’t—”

Luke waved her interruption away and shook his head. “I made one of their mistakes in the end. I saw the Force as one or the other, Light or Dark with no in-between. Now, I know that it doesn’t _have_ to be like that, but back then, I was entrusted with the training of a boy who was so very torn between both and I encouraged him to shut out a part of himself. I must have made him feel so _broken.”_ His fists clenched enough for Rey to hear the whir of wires in his cybernetic hand, and a stray flame leapt up in a furious arc before dying out. “Han and Leia loved him as much as it’s possible to love someone, but they were busy. I had other padawans to care for. When Snoke got into Ben’s head, I don’t think Ben ever stood a chance. Who could he have gone to?”

“But you _loved_ him,” Rey argued, clinging to her piping hot mug to stop herself from saying that she would have given anything to know what it felt like to be loved, or to remember if she _had_ been loved at all, “and shouldn’t that have been enough?”

As soon as the words had left her mouth, Luke’s face crumpled. He was silent for a beat, and his fingers twitched. If he were a more tactile man, he’d have pulled her close, crushing her against his roughspun robes and the scent of ocean spray. “Love isn’t a cure-all,” he told her, sounding as though he’d aged a hundred years. “If it was, neither of us would be in this position. We—Han, my sister, and I—would have loved him to safety, away from Snoke.”

Rey picked up her fork as Luke had taught her and carelessly stabbed at a slice of fish, her hunger gone all of a sudden. Would her parents have done the same for her? Something stole her memories from her in a haze of bells and smoke and ash—would her family have tried to protect her then?

“Now finish your food, Just Rey.” Luke stirred his own mug of tea. “I have something to show you.”

Her thoughts were elsewhere as they ate, listening to the sighing of the surf and the snapping of the firewood as it burned. She was somewhere she’d never been, somewhere from a past life, where silken silvery petals spiralled down to tree roots that twisted in the grass, and where birds sang as they soared over mountaintops. _Yours,_ they warbled to her, _yours,_ but she blinked them away. Nowhere was hers. Luke had his Tatooine, which he spoke of in an almost fond _this is my shitty rock and only_ I _can call it a shitty rock_ way, but Jakku had never been _home._

Once they’d both eaten, Luke stood. He extinguished the campfire with a casual flick of his wrist and started to walk, gesturing for her to follow.

He led them across the grass to the edge of a cliff, where the sea and the sky met at the horizon and stretched out together, far enough to go on forever. Clouds scudded overhead, sunset gilding their swollen underbellies, and if she turned around, she’d see the Jedi Temple perched at the top of the old steps as though looking down on them. It hummed with a quiet power that had nothing to do with the staticky crackle vibrating in the atmosphere and reverberating in her bones, a sure sign that it was about to rain.

Eons ago, Jedi would have strolled through the Temple’s halls, their robes whispering against the stone, but now they were gone and there was only Luke and his ghosts.

“Do you still not remember anything of your family? Or anything from somewhere that feels like it might be your home?” he asked.

Rey chewed on her bottom lip, hesitating before she answered. Luke had an aura of gentle understanding about him, but something felt impossibly childish in admitting to clinging to dreams— _vague_ dreams, at that, as frail and fragile as the scales on a moth’s wings, never anything that she could hold on to and savour. “Lately,” she replied, weighing her words, “I’ve been dreaming of things that feel familiar, even though they can’t be. Sunny blue oceans. Ringing bells. Silver flowers. Soft murmurs that—” she glanced away, cheeks blazing, “—that sound like they’re telling stories. I know it sounds stupid, but they’re comforting. Before Jakku, there’s just this big hole in my memory.”

Luke raised an eyebrow. “That’s anything _but_ stupid,” he said, a light laugh in his voice. “You know, I used to imagine my parents when I was young, even younger than you. I didn’t know much about who they were, so I made them up.”

“You did?”

“My aunt and uncle would sometimes speak about a woman I guessed was my mother. They’d say that she was beautiful and very kind, and that she had expensive clothes and soft hands.” Luke smiled as if to himself, the crinkles around his eyes deepening. “In my head, she was a rich, kind woman from somewhere far away—the Core, maybe—and she dressed in fabrics as bright as gemstones, while my father was a daring, adventurous pilot who could speak every language there was, from Binary to Mando’a. He was suntanned and silver-tongued, and I decided that he must have charmed her. She wouldn’t have thought much of him at first.”

“Were you right?” Rey asked, trying to fight off a smile and losing the battle.

The grin that Luke gave in response was almost boyish. “From a certain point of view.”

Unbidden, her mind raced with snapshots of him, blurry like the stuttering holographs she’d dug out of wrecked ships, blinking to unsteady life in her cupped palms. She saw him in half-buried memories that couldn’t have been anyone’s but hers—sat haloed with glowing cubes that idly floated in a ring around him, then beaming as he pressed a wooden stick into her eager hands and guided her into an opening stance—and then that man vanished, and nearly fifteen years had passed.

She looked below her, fixing her gaze on the crashing waves that battered, relentless, against a nest of rocks. Luke hadn’t reacted to what she’d just seen, and she was tempted to screw her eyes up in concentration, search through the fog of her life before Jakku with blind fingers, drag the protesting images back, then greedily demand that they tell her everything.

“I’d make up my own stories on Jakku,” she confessed to the sea. “Some were about who my family might be—who _I_ might be—but others were about the people around Niima Outpost. I’d always see this one wrinkled old woman hobbling about between the stalls, selling things she’d made out of nerf-leather: straps, belts, pouches, you name it. She was really short, not even shoulder height on me, but she had a jagged scar going down her lip to her chin, and I used to pretend that she got it from a bar fight in Cratertown, or that she used to be an assassin. That kind of thing.”

Luke snorted in a manner most undignified for a master Jedi, and for a while, a companionable silence fell between them until he pointed up at the Jedi Temple.

“I don’t know how long I spent in there after the attack on my Praxeum, but while I was looking for answers, a series of visions came to me, telling me what the Force wants: to be in balance. We all have Light and Dark in us, and it’s what we do with those parts of ourselves that matters. That’s what the Jedi refused to accept. What _I_ refused to accept, until Ben… Ben made his choices, I won’t deny that, but I certainly helped him along…” Luke trailed off, his frame seeming to deflate. He took a breath, inclined his head towards the point where the sea and the sky met, and urged her, “Look. This is what I wanted to show you.”

Before her very eyes, the setting sun split in two, cracking like an egg. Each half shaped itself into an orb, with one tingeing the rusty brown of dried blood and the other a dimly-lit dove-grey, both peppered with countless craters—twin moons, Rey realised, air catching in her throat. The clouds drew towards each other as though spellbound and swirled themselves into a sphere larger than the two moons, then coloured like a marble in greens and blues, forming a verdant planet strewn with winding rivers and vast oceans.

“What…” she breathed. _Is this magic?_ she almost whispered until she caught herself. “How are you doing this?”

“I’ll teach you one day,” Luke promised. Weaving a story of his own, he continued, “Thousands of years ago, before the Jedi and _way_ before the Sith, there were the Je’daii, from the planet Tython. It had two moons: Ashla of the Light—” Rey’s eyes were inexplicably drawn towards the moon bathed in light, “—and Bogan of the Dark.” As he spoke the word, she darted her gaze to the rust-brown moon, which was veiled in the shadowiness of the approaching night. “The Je’daii thought Tython birthed its two moons in fire to remind everyone of the struggle to keep balance between Light and Dark; to remind them that neither can exist without the other.”

“Later, the Je’daii would exile members of their Order who’d strayed too far into the Dark to Bogan, where they’d meditate on Ashla until they were balanced again, and those too reliant on the Light would be sent to Ashla to meditate on Bogan.” At Luke’s cue, miniature ships zoomed between the planet and the moons like tiny firing comets. “Tython itself would react to the Force being imbalanced; it would be hit by terrible storms and massive groundquakes.” White-hot forks of lightning shot from out of nowhere and struck Tython’s surface, and though it was only an illusion, Rey could _hear_ the rumbling of thunder.

Real raindrops pattered against the top of her head in amongst the fading sounds of Luke’s storm. “What happened to the Je’daii?”

“War,” Luke replied simply, as a great fissure snaked across the planet and fractured it apart. “Some began to devote themselves to the Ashla, and others to the Bogan. The Light Side adherents founded a new group—the Jedi Order—and a cataclysm forced the followers of the Bogan to flee to the very edge of the galaxy. After that, Tython was lost for millennia.”

As the vision wavered and evaporated, colour seeped from the clouds and drained into the ocean in multi-hued rivulets. Rey reeled, brushing damp tendrils of hair from her face, and imagined herself as one of the Je’daii, shoved onto a ship and made to flit from Ashla to Bogan and back again with no end in sight. “I don’t think I’d have been a good Jedi,” she mumbled at last. “I… I came too close to killing Kylo Ren on Starkiller Base when we fought. There was a voice in my head that wanted me to do it—was _demanding_ I do it—until I pulled myself back.” She clenched her fists and made herself admit, “I could have _killed_ your nephew.”

For what felt like an infinity, Luke considered her without saying anything. Had he sensed the Darkness in her? Did it frighten him, or did he see her as being like Ben?

“But you didn’t,” he reminded her with a small smile. “You _could_ have, but you chose not to. Besides, the Je’daii would have been bad Jedi. Hells, even _I’m_ not so sure I was ever a good Jedi, and yet, I’m the last one.”

“What do you mean? You’re Luke Skywalker, you—”

Luke laughed at her bewilderment. “I was _reckless_ ,” he told her, grinning. “Headstrong, rebellious, and more impatient than a Jedi should be. People used to tell me that I was naïve for insisting on seeing the good in almost everyone, and they’d think I’m a fool for believing that Ben could still come back, but all I ever _wanted_ was to have faith in people. It was never as if I was inviting the local Sith Lord over for a cup of caf and some flatcakes.” Pulling up his hood to shield himself from the now-pouring rain, he backed away from the cliff’s edge as though seeing fit to retreat, then stilled. “Rey?”

When Rey turned around, blinking beads of water from her spiked-black eyelashes, Luke lowered his head. His eyes were weary when he met her gaze again, and he’d steeled his jaw and set his mouth into a firm line. “There’s many things that I’d change in hindsight, like how I dealt with Ben, or my choice to leave my Praxeum. I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling guilty for those things, and nor do I think I _should._ But I wanted you to know—no, I needed you to know—that if I’d had the _slightest_ clue as to where you were, I’d have come for you at once.” His voice was so fierce, so resolved, that all Rey could do was believe him. “They could have sent the entire damn Empire, or every living being in the First Order, but _nothing_ would have stopped me.”

An unspoken _do you understand_ hung in the air between them, thick with words that must have been weighing anvil-heavy on his shoulders since she’d arrived on Ahch-To, oblivious to her past and her bizarre bond with Kylo Ren. Lost for a response, certain that a mere _thank you_ wouldn’t be enough, Rey gave Luke a nod, which seemed to satisfy him.

While Luke walked away towards the huts, she lingered at the cliff’s edge. She held her palms up, letting rain pool in them, watching the sun sink and feeling lighter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, and thank you for reading! 
> 
> I've been working on this fic ever since I fell hopelessly in love with Reylo in December 2015, so some parts (like Ben's surname being Organa, and Ben having turned as a teenager) don't mesh well with canon anymore, but I hope that's not too big of an issue! I've taken some elements from _Bloodline_ and the _Aftermath_ trilogy, including Han's nickname for Ben—"little bandit". 
> 
> Everything is outlined in eye-watering detail, four chapters are already pre-written, and I imagine this thing will be long enough to print out and use as a weapon by the time it's done. My chapters do tend to be on the long side, too, at around 8-14k, so do let me know if you'd prefer them shorter and I'll find places to separate them. :)
> 
> [Wounds in the Force](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wound_in_the_Force) are weaknesses in the fabric of the Force and can be formed when many lives are lost in a short period of time, or at the site of a traumatic event. 
> 
> The ability to sever an individual's connection to the Force is known as [Sever Force](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sever_Force). I've taken some liberties with it, along with Force ghosts (and not just because I love Padmé and think there should be more of her).
> 
> [The Je'daii Order](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Je%27daii_Order) was founded over thirty thousand years prior to the events of TFA, on the planet [Tython](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tython) with its two moons, [Ashla](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ashla_\(moon\)) and [Bogan](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bogan).
> 
> [H'kak bean tea](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tatooine_H%27Kak_bean_tea) is a traditional Tatooinian drink, said to have relaxing and detoxifying effects. Luke has had over a decade on his island to perfect his tea-making and fish-cooking techniques.


	2. A Girl in a Queen's Clothes

The rain had been pouring for days on end.

A bright, fierce flash of lightning struck the marshy ground outside the Dark Force Temple hidden deep in the jungles of Dromund Kaas, flooding its shadowy halls and casting the face of some long-dead Sith Lord’s statue in stark, shock-white light, illuminating a severe brow, bitter mouth, and a chipped nose. Thunder roared and shook the temple’s ancient walls, and the atmosphere seemed to roil, alive with charged air and the buzzing of clashing blades.

With practised ease, Kylo Ren slipped into Djem So and aimed a powerful slash at Enyo Ren’s midsection with his training blade. He gritted his teeth behind his helmet in frustration as she dodged, far too fast, catching herself before she could stumble.

His skin crawled with a sense of unease that had nothing to do with the storm raging outside, the tiny hairs at the back of his neck prickling and standing straight up. He dared dart a glance away: perched on his throne at the opposite end of the hall, draped in a hooded white robe that concealed the sunken, jagged gash caving in his forehead, Supreme Leader Snoke watched with his scar-warped mouth twisted in a frown, his fingers tapping a restless beat against the throne’s arms.

Not for the first time that day, Kylo felt a flicker of relief, glad for the fact that his master couldn’t see his face.

As he pivoted his body away from a retaliatory strike meant for his shoulder—the one that bore the scavenger’s mark, even now, six standard months after she’d left him in the snow on Starkiller Base—his booted feet scuffed against the stone floor, skidding over the clumps of spindly weeds growing through the cracks in the slabs. Their little bell-shaped flower buds had drooped and shrivelled black and lifeless, and their leaves had yellowed like old paper, curling in on themselves against the thick, invisible fog of Dark Side energy creeping through the building and clinging to every surface.

_The Light gives,_ he’d been told when he’d been younger, still calling himself by that dead boy’s name, _but the Dark takes._ Luke Skywalker had framed it as a bad thing, sitting him down in his library and feeding him cautionary tales of Sith from legends, ones foolish enough to be torn apart by their own greed. Ben Organa had listened, his fingernails digging half-moon prints into his thighs, trying to find that traitorous part of himself to seize it and bury it too far down to reach. Years later, as Kylo Ren had kneeled amongst the vines snaking around Supreme Leader Snoke’s dais, he’d been asked: _how can order—peace, prosperity, justice, everything you seek—ever be achieved in a galaxy as lawless as this without there being someone to_ take _it?_

Enyo Ren launched herself at him again, using what he recognised at once as a haphazard brand of Juyo, jumbled together from the few holocrons they’d recovered. Narrowing his eyes, Kylo lifted his weapon, prepared to knock her off-guard and—

_Sithspit—_

He heard the hiss of the training blade colliding with the side of his neck before the pain came blazing through his nerves a moment afterwards.

Kylo froze, sucking in a short, sharp breath that grated against his helmet’s vocoder, blinking back the haze of technicolour stars shooting haywire paths across his field of view. Enyo was smiling behind her mask, he could tell; satisfaction rolled from her in proud, golden waves. Years of Snoke’s teachings had taught him not to cry out, so he bit the inside of his cheek to stifle the harsh curse that would have tumbled from his tongue, knowing that any sound he made would have her lips curling in a savage grin, baring her teeth like a wild manka cat about to pounce.

If Enyo had been wielding a real blade and not a flimsy thing designed for a padawan’s fumbling hands, she’d have cleaved his head from his shoulders, and then Supreme Leader Snoke would have made her his new apprentice and pronounced _her_ Master of the Knights of Ren. The thought was hardly worth entertaining: out of all the Knights, only _he_ was allowed to carry a lightsaber, the highest honour any of them could be granted. He’d found the crystal himself, unearthed it from what remained of the caves on Ilum, and then he’d bled it until it turned red, spending hours bending it to his will until it sang for him.

They circled each other, the Sith Lord’s statue sneering down at them as though daring him to give up. Enyo lunged for him again, rushing towards him, forcing him to screw up his nose against the metallic tang of yozusk blood, which had soaked into her cloak in lurid green splatters.

Focusing on the pulses of pain throbbing in his neck, Kylo fought back, parrying each of her blows and striking her left arm hard enough to sever a piece of her roughspun robe, sending a shred of singed fabric fluttering to the ground. An angry pink burn raised on the exposed flesh of her bicep, but she stayed maddeningly silent, her gloved fingers tightening around her training blade’s hilt as though itching to drive it between his ribs.

In his determination to win their sparring match and wipe the smug smile off Enyo’s face, Kylo hadn’t noticed that the Supreme Leader had stepped down from his throne, sweeping towards him in a flurry of trailing cloaks.

“Your reactions were slower than usual,” he murmured, orbiting him in dizzying circles that made Kylo’s head spin. “I need not tell you that an enemy would not have hesitated before taking full advantage of every opening you left.” Snoke appraised him with ice-chip blue eyes, his gaze travelling up Kylo’s stock-still frame and lingering on his visor. He must have disliked what he found written there, for a note of warning entered his ruined rasp of a voice. “You’re trying my patience more and more, Kylo Ren. I might be more forgiving, more willing to dismiss your recent mistakes, had you not failed me on Heorot and Boreas.”

Kylo’s weapon felt too childish in his too-large, too-clammy hands all of a sudden, like a plaything that Ben Organa would have swung wildly in his bedroom, pretending to be a Jedi like his uncle, yelling and leaping and _laughing._

He thumbed it off and schooled his face blank, ignoring the bead of cold sweat trickling down his temple. When he opened his mouth to defend himself, every last one of his made-up excuses— _my arm was still mending on Heorot; the medics said I’d need at least a month to recover_ and _the scavenger girl is strong; far stronger than I’d expected_ —died in his throat.

The First Order had engaged with the Resistance twice since the destruction of Starkiller Base. Twice—first on rocky, half-abandoned Heorot and then on Boreas, swathed in glaciers—he’d failed to capture Rey and Luke Skywalker. Each time, he and Rey had duelled away from the epicentre of the battle, where Luke had no doubt been assisting the Resistance, and so it should have been simple enough for him to overpower her and bring her to his master. If he’d wanted to, he could have delved into her clever mind and flicked her consciousness out like a light, then carried her limp, sparrow-thin body in his arms back to his ship.

And yet, there had been no venom in their fights. The supernova-bright fury that had flared in her eyes on Starkiller Base was missing. Neither had wanted to kill the other, though he never had, not even after she’d scarred him. Not with the _connection_ between them, the gossamer-spun thread he’d treasonously kept secret from Snoke and hadn’t voiced aloud until Rey had growled something about a _bond_ and _can’t break it, Luke can’t fix it, stuck with it, try to shut you out._

_Good,_ Kylo had replied as he’d caught her in saberlock, watching her brows furrow in confusion. _Snoke can’t know._

The Supreme Leader adopted a softer, almost kind tone, but Kylo knew not to let his guard inch down: it was a cadence Snoke reserved for when he was at his most dangerous. “As Master of the Knights of Ren, you must _always_ appear strong and unfaltering. You know this, and you knew what was expected of you from the beginning, when I took you in.” Snoke drew closer still, towering over him by almost a foot, and added, “Do not get complacent. _I_ see you as a worthy investment, but your Knights may not.”

Kylo struggled against the urge to swallow hard, all too aware that the other six Knights were watching wordlessly. There was an unspoken rule within their order, one that had been around before he’d joined and brought most of them with him: if a member grew unhappy with their master’s leadership—if they thought they could do a better job—they could challenge them to a duel, often to the death.

No one had ever challenged him.

_(It happened when he was twenty-two years old. Pollux Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, had been growing headstrong and overconfident for some time, arrogant enough to believe himself invincible. Everything came to a head when he led them into a fight—where or with whom, Kylo couldn’t remember now—that almost got every single one of them killed. Nox bore his facial wound after that, an uneven pink burn that bloomed across most of his right cheek, missing his eye by a fingerbreadth. They found Saarai injured and barely breathing. Though Kylo knew of the healing that the Light offered, he couldn’t bear to let himself reach for it, and the Dark Side hadn’t been enough. She’d died in the dirt, rivers of her blood streaming past his trembling palms._

_As they were recovering, mud-smeared and smelling of iron and sweat, Kylo challenged Pollux to a duel, pulling off his own helmet and waiting for Pollux to do the same. After they bowed to each other, Kylo surged forwards._

_By all accounts, it was unfair. The Supreme Leader had always praised Kylo’s potential and raw power, so while Pollux tightened his fist in the air and tried to choke the life from him, Kylo used his ability to sever an individual’s connection to the Force for the last time. He pinched Pollux out as easy as blowing out a candle, giving him no chance to comprehend his sudden, gaping_ loss _of the living galaxy around him before thrusting his lightsaber through his chest._

_The dull thud of Pollux’s body slumping to the ground resounded in his ears for the next week, playing back as he lay down to sleep. It felt less like a victory and more like an emptiness, a hollow space spreading somewhere in his core. When the adrenaline of battle ebbed away from his sparking veins and they burned both bodies, the Light haunted him like a ghost, tugging at him, begging him to listen—)_

In the wake of Snoke’s cautioning words, silence blanketed the hall, so heavy, Kylo could hear almost everything around him: rain drumming against the temple’s roof; the anxious shuffling of the other Knights, unused to watching their master being scolded like a misbehaving child; his own pulse thudding to match the downpour; a lone vornskr howling and pacing outside. Then, two echoing footsteps rang out, making one measured stride across the stone.

“I would like to challenge Kylo Ren to a duel for the position of Master of the Knights of Ren.”

The ground plummeted away from Kylo’s feet, leaving him reeling, his heart plunging to the pit of his stomach. He whipped around to face Enyo, who tilted her chin up at him in what could have been either defiance or mockery.

_Damn her!_

Any Knight could challenge their leader whenever and wherever they pleased, with no ceremony besides announcing their intention, and there was no way to decline. It was supposed to keep them on their toes; to remind them that wherever there was power, there would be those who craved it, like the Sith had made law with their Rule of Two a millennium ago. _Once somebody requests the duel, that’s it,_ Kylo thought, mouth pressed in a grim line and his hand automatically moving to free his lightsaber from where it hung on his belt, _kill or be killed._ Kill one of his Knights—one hellbent on thwarting him at every turn, but one of his Knights nonetheless—or die defeated like Pollux.

An electric-shock shiver ran through the rest of his Knights, their unique signatures in the Force quivering like drawn bowstrings. While Ankou was as indecipherable as always, her emotions carefully shrouded, Phobos and Siqsa stirred with thin-veiled interest. Charon felt tense enough to snap, teetering on the edge of blurting out a call for Enyo to _stop._

The Supreme Leader regarded her, shrewd, weighing the confident set of her shoulders and the inky smudge of her in the Force. “Are you certain?” he asked.

Enyo Ren nodded without even an ounce of hesitation; if anything, her modulated voice grew firmer. “Yes.”

He’d expected Snoke to shake his head, commend her for her display of ambition, and reply that Kylo—the best of all the apprentices who’d come before, who Snoke had been guiding since childhood, living and whispering in some secret, shadow-shrouded corner of his mind since before he could _speak—_ would go unchallenged.

Instead, Snoke held out his hands for their training lightsabers, the rope-like tendons in his bony wrists flexing as they moved. “Then you may begin.”

There was no time to protest—the Supreme Leader was not to be questioned, and to try to avoid the duel would be to appear weak, like he didn’t believe in his ability to win. Kylo’s own hands felt as though they belonged to someone else as he lifted off his helmet and threw it aside, Enyo taking her place roughly a metre away and mirroring him. He knew his Knights’ faces as well as they knew his, and every bit of her was poised for the fight: her grey eyes glared flinty, her crow-black curls had been tamed into a plain chignon at the nape of her neck, and there was a cruel, confident twist to her full mouth. She bowed, not too low, never taking her eyes off her target.

Kylo thumbed on his lightsaber, the crackling red plasma beams bursting up and out with a hiss. He swung for her dominant arm—

_(Luke Skywalker, sandy-haired and worry-free, stood addressing a medley of padawans, arranged in a many-coloured semicircle around him. He pointed to the glowing diagram cast out by the holoprojector: a person’s outline with neat dotted lines drawn at their wrist; their neck; straight across their waist; across each limb._

_“This mark of contact is called a_ cho sun, _the amputation of an opponent’s weapon arm.” The irony of his uncle using his cybernetic hand to indicate the line cutting across the outline’s inner elbow was not lost on Ben Organa. “Can any of you tell me why the Jedi and the Sith might have used it?”_

_Ben Organa raised his hand. “For the Jedi,” he said, as clear as he could muster in his fracturing teenager’s voice, not yet as deep as it would become by his fourteenth birthday, “it was favoured because it was non-lethal, a means of ending a duel without causing any unnecessary deaths. For the Sith, it represented pain and humiliation. But it was also a mercy, because a Sith would have preferred to kill their opponent.”)_

—but Enyo leapt out of the way.

A split-second later, a blast of the Force hit him square in the ribcage, shoving every gulp of oxygen out from his unready lungs and tossing him aside like an oversized ragdoll. His lightsaber extinguished itself and clattered to the floor not far away, while he landed and skidded on his back, the edges of his vision spotting and tunnelling. Inhaling became a battle of its own, his winded breaths coming in staccato, shallow pants. A dull ache pounded a painful rhythm at the back of his head from the impact, each beat in his skull urging him to _get up, get up, get up._

His fingers scrabbled for purchase, finally managing to thrust him upright. With a snarl, he pulled his lightsaber to him and aimed a mighty push at her.

Enyo slammed against the sour-faced Sith Lord’s statue with a muffled _thump._ For a flit-fast instant, he imagined that it might groan, give way, and crumble into a hundred pieces to come crashing down on top of her, but only a fine shower of dust and tiny chips of stone broke from the plinth and scattered around her. When she jumped to her feet, shaking a cloud of dust from her mess of hair, her teeth were bared and pure malice flashed in her eyes.

She hurtled towards him with a yell, and as he white-knuckled his lightsaber in his grip and steeled himself to swing, she fell to a sudden stop and held her palm up. Tendrils of mist as dark as midnight swirled around her slender fingers, weaving in the gaps between, converging to a sharp point—

Her signature manoeuvre. How many people had she killed with her Darkshears alone? He’d seen what they could do to a person—

Without any time to think, Kylo kicked her away. It wasn’t his move, he realised; it was a scavenger’s trick forged from desert scuffles and swift blows to a thief’s belly with a salvaged quarterstaff, because she’d become as much a part of him as he had of her.

Enyo let out a strangled grunt as she hit the ground again, her eyebrows drawn taut with the amount of energy it took to regain her breath. Kylo advanced, his steps now effortless and sure-footed, his lightsaber humming under his fingers. He froze her with the Force, watching her struggle in vain against his hold, and at that moment, the power that swelled and crested within him didn’t feel entirely his own. It was recognisable as his—gunmetal shot with molten silver, sometimes shifting murkier or lighter—but there was a faint whirl of gold mixed in, the shade of sun-baked dunes and fields rolling with honey-hued flowers.

Kylo Ren brandished his lightsaber at her throat, which bobbed with each of her nervous swallows. One clean strike and he could end it. He could regain the Supreme Leader’s approval. No one would ever doubt him again.

_(Somebody—one of Snoke’s men by the look of him, raspy-voiced, a featureless mask obscuring his face—seized the girl with the three buns by her skinny arm, ignoring her squeals, bites, and frantic kicks at his shins. “What do we do with this one? She’s a_ youngling. _What use would the Supreme Leader have for such a scrawny little thing?”_

_The girl who hadn’t yet named herself Enyo eyed the wriggling girl, lip twitching in thought. “Ben can’t take the Force from her; none of us have the time to find somewhere to put a five-year-old.” She spoke so callously about the girl she’d known since she’d been introduced to them two years ago, pinking at the cheeks and shying away behind Luke’s leg, and her tone was nonchalant as she suggested, “It’s best if we just kill her.”_

_Not-quite-Ben, not-yet-Kylo made himself known, lurching forwards out of the smoke. “No,” he hurried out. “No, it’s all right. I’ll take care of it.”)_

He’d almost forgotten that the Supreme Leader was there, or that he had an audience at all, until Snoke softly asked in his ear, his breath several degrees too cold for any living being, “Will you grant Enyo Ren mercy, Kylo Ren? Or will you kill her?”

Kylo glanced over at the rest of his Knights, dimly aware of his chest heaving. Charon’s fists were balled up, and Ankou made the slightest shake of her head, so small, it would have been unnoticeable to anyone who hadn’t been searching for it.

_(“What is mercy, Kylo Ren?”_

_“It is weakness, Supreme Leader.”)_

He raised his weapon—

_(On Boreas, ice bit into his back, seeping through his surcoat and undertunic, ushering a numbing chill into his bones. Like an_ amateur, _he’d slipped on the slick ground, frozen into spiralling fractals of cracks and branching cobweb patterns. He’d dropped his lightsaber, and while he scrambled to get up, Rey stood over him with her blade lit, bathing him in a glow of blue so blinding-bright, he had to squint up at her. It pointed at the hollow of his throat, at his Adam’s apple, and he could feel its heat radiating against his skin in an echo of the burn she’d left him with on Starkiller Base._

_She could kill him and the galaxy—Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and the ghosts of everyone he’d killed—would thank her. She could twist her face in rage, strike down hard and true, and leave him there to die._

_But she didn’t._

_Rey shook her head, her thumb hovering over her lightsaber’s power switch. “If I kill you like this—” her words hitched, snagging on grief that he ought to have been branded a traitor for sharing, “—then Han Solo died for nothing.”_

_All he could do was watch her go. It should have been the worst kind of weakness, the way she’d foolishly turned her back on him and headed back to the battle, to her friends. But the staunch line of her narrow shoulders, the determined clench of her fist around Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber, and the sweep of her cloak hemmed in glittering ice crystals looked nothing like weakness—it was strength personified, and he could only guess at how much of her it had taken to pull back from a place where one simple stab would have ended it all.)_

—and drew the blade mere inches above the white line of Enyo Ren’s throat. “ _Sai cha,_ ” he muttered. The mark of contact for a complete and total decapitation. _I could have killed you if I’d wanted to,_ it said, _you’re alive only because I_ chose _to give you mercy._

With a casual flick of his wrist, Kylo released the invisible cords binding her. She swayed on her knees, then was quick to stagger up and heave her mask back on, her signature in the Force a storm cloud, swollen with wounded pride and fury.

Ankou Ren gave a little nod. He returned the gesture, exhaling enough to deflate.

“Mercy,” Snoke started, rounding on Kylo. “An… _unusual_ choice.” He nodded slowly and deliberately, pausing as if to let the weight of what he’d said without words— _you’ve disappointed me again, boy_ —sink in, and then told him, “Return to the _Finalizer,_ Kylo Ren. Once there, you will await further instruction on your final task. I believe that we may be able to complete your training after all.”

Outside the temple, sheets of rain buffeted him, sticking locks of his hair together into damp tangles and dripping from the tip of his nose. He allowed himself a few brief moments of breathing it in—soaking, waterlogged ground, wet wood and tree-bark, and humid air—before blocking all of it out with his helmet, trudging through the swamp with squelching footfalls, his lightsaber lit to fend off vornskrs and yozusks.

The _Finalizer_ orbited a short shuttle’s journey from Dromund Kaas, stationed there by the Supreme Leader’s decree. It unnerved him how relieved he felt at the thought of leaving the planet. Dromund Kaas ought to feel _right,_ like the home he’d never truly felt like he’d had. A nexus of Dark Side energy welled under the temple, and he ought to be thriving in it. Even the vornskrs—massive, fanged, canine creatures, drooling spools of saliva at the scent of a Force-sensitive—ought to feel right, since the Sith had used them to guard their temples for millennia. Instead, everything pinched like an ill-fitting boot.

Kylo set his jaw. He would complete whatever the Supreme Leader’s final task was, and it would erase all the doubt within him.

 

* * *

 

For years, since the Supreme Leader had first pressed the grimacing lump into his eager hands, Kylo Ren had scoured every inch of Darth Vader’s mask with his eyes, searching for answers etched into the distorted mass of durasteel and plasteel; any sign that would bring an end to the war inside him.

“I’ve been… flagging,” he murmured to it, hunching over his elbows in confession, keeping his voice low despite being alone in his quarters. “The call to the Light is at the strongest it’s ever been. I keep thinking of… things; things I shouldn’t be. I _need_ your guidance again, Grandfather.” He sucked in a long, rattling breath and asked desperately, “How do I stop?”

Lately, he’d been thinking of things that were closed to him forever. Often, it was General Organa; wispy ghost-traces of her, like the floral scent of the ladalum perfume she’d always worn, or the vague memory of the Alderaanian fairy tales she’d drifted him—no, _Ben_ —off to sleep with, or the house they’d had in Theed, deep in the capital of Naboo, where ivy crept up the walls to his bedroom window, growing thick enough for him to imagine using it like a rope ladder. Sometimes, it was Luke Skywalker, and the tentative promise of something new sprouting from the ashes of something old, and how he’d destroyed it all.

There was always the scavenger girl—no, _Rey_ —and the haunting could-have-beens: how they might have been kindred spirits in another life; one where Snoke had never whispered to him; where he’d stayed at the Praxeum; where he’d never bundled her and his most precious possessions off to some dust-heap of a planet with a junkboss who hadn’t kept his word.

Kylo shook his head as if to ward off those errant thoughts, his eyes finding Vader’s helmet again. “My sentiment is my weakness. I know this, and I need to—I need to stop it. The Supreme Leader _promised_ that I—that Ben would become something more than just an oversensitive, idiotic boy with powers that frightened his too-busy parents.” _But all that happened was death and destruction, while the galaxy deteriorated even further around me,_ he thought, holding those words on his tongue for fear of what speaking them aloud might mean. “I watched the obliteration of the Hosnian system and I was _horrified,_ not hopeful,” he admitted, remembering how, as Hosnian Prime had turned to careening atoms and floating stardust, he’d thought of Alderaan’s blood running through his veins and he’d wanted to vomit.

Nothing.

Vader hadn’t spoken to him for some time now.

Carefully, Kylo pulled off his gloves, laying them down on his desk next to where he’d placed his own mask. With trembling, bare hands, he picked up Vader’s helmet as though compelled to, and his quarters melted away as his head filled with images that weren’t his, so real, he could see and smell and hear everything—

_(In the midst of the forest, Luke Skywalker watched a pyre burn, his face solemn, his hands clasped in front of him. As the flames roared, Darth Vader’s ashes flickered and dispersed into a star-specked sky, rising above the tree canopies, while the helmet bubbled, bent, and oozed down to nothing._

_And yet, there was the Supreme Leader in his throne room, passing a mangled helmet to Kylo Ren, a gangly boy draped in robes that were almost too big for him, his head bowed in reverence, shoulders still wrapped in a fraying, scorched cape that he couldn’t let go of, even though it had belonged to the boy he’d been before.)_

Darth Vader’s helmet was a fake.

It had been a trick, and he’d fallen for it like a fool.

The helmet slid out of his hands and landed on the floor with a deafening _clang_ that bounced off the walls and reverberated in his chest, where his heart felt as though it had been taken in an icy fist and squeezed choke-tight, stuttering against its wintry cage. For a moment, his body refused to co-operate, and all that would leave his mouth was a pleading “Stop—no—” until his limbs unlocked and he could bring himself to move again.

Kylo stumbled back, his forearms chilling taut with gooseflesh as the space around him sang with energy, coming alive with the same familiar presence he’d felt aboard the shuttle to Dromund Kaas all those months ago. Fuel, leather, woodsmoke, and something wholly ethereal, too intangible to describe. He hadn’t felt it since he’d arrived on Dromund Kaas—he’d had the silent ghosts of the Sith and the Empire for company there—and so he’d dismissed it as nothing more than a medication-induced hallucination; his mind going haywire and inventing things that weren’t there.

He’d been wrong, of course. Whipping his head up, he saw him shimmer into being, hazy and then painfully distinct: Han Solo, hale and whole and _young,_ casting off soft rays of light in the controlled dimness of Kylo’s quarters.

“It’s all true. That thing’s a fake. A damn good one, sure, but still a fake.” A small, understanding smile quirked up Han’s lips, and he seemed almost apologetic as he said, “It had to be like this, kid. It was the only way you’d listen, if it came from him.”

Han stepped closer, his footfalls soundless. Kylo flinched, backing away against his desk with nowhere else to go: if Han reached him, he would be able to touch him again, and if he did, Kylo felt certain that he would shatter apart. He bumped into his desk, scattering a pile of holobooks to the ground.

“How—how are you here?” Kylo demanded, teeth chattering. He remembered what he’d read in the old texts given to him years ago, but for Han to be able to materialise before him, another Force user’s ghost would have had to have helped. “You’re _dead._ ”

“Dead as a doornail. Yeah, I noticed,” Han replied dryly. “Look, I had a little help.” If he was at all offended by Kylo’s reaction, or rightfully furious about having been murdered, he showed no sign of it, though he held his translucent palms out in a gesture of peace, as if to prove to him that he wouldn’t approach any further. “I’m about as Force-sensitive as your average brick, so I can’t give you any fancy explanation other than that your grandpa—Anakin, not Vader—worked a bit of his mumbo-jumbo. And now I’m here.”

Kylo shook his head again, faster and more fervent this time. “Vader spoke to me,” he insisted, fighting to steady his voice, clutching the edge of his desk with both hands and letting it dig dull lines into the meat of his palms. “The Supreme Leader—he was wise—he told me that Grandfather _wanted_ this; wanted me to finish what he could not—”

“The Supreme Leader is wise?” Han echoed. “Kriffing _look_ at yourself, Ben.”

Turning, if only to escape that name, Kylo glared at the mirror hanging above his desk. It had been a while since he’d been confronted with his reflection in something as clear and as static as mirrorglass—on Dromund Kaas, there had just been the fogged-up side of his straight razor, or murky puddles with raindrops rippling his features. His hair was a wild tangle, and almost unconsciously, he traced the pad of his thumb over the washed-out lilac smeared underneath his tired eyes, ignoring the pale pink scar disappearing under his collar. When had his face started to look so drawn?

“Believe it or not, I heard what Snoke’s orders were on that shuttle. Acting like he was being, I don’t know, some mouldy Dark Lord saint by letting you keep your own arm.” Han glanced in the mirror, meeting Kylo’s gaze there, and Kylo felt a faint twinge in his gut to see that he, too, had a reflection. “See, I don’t know much about Jedi stuff,” Han went on, frowning, “but I’d always assumed that a master was supposed to, y’know, guide you. Help you. Not—this.”

“The Supreme Leader does what is necessary. I failed him.”

“He’s _using_ you, is what he’s doing!” Han burst out, his form blazing like a leaping flame, his sudden scalding anger forcing Kylo to face him. “You’ve never thought about why it’s only _you_ who gets to use a lightsaber?” He jerked his thumb towards the weapon resting at Kylo’s hip. “It’s sure as hell not meant as an honour, kid, if that’s what he’s been telling you. It’s because he knows that if you turned against him, and you’re the only one with a lightsaber, he could beat you easy. He’s not stupid. If all _seven_ of you—you and those overgrown loth-bats you call friends—had one, and then got sick of him? He’d be screwed.”

“Why do you care now?” Kylo snapped. “Why now, when I left over a decade ago? When it’s too late for me to come home, wherever that is? You and I both know that I lost any chances I might have had when I stripped Skywalker’s padawans of the Force. If there was a bridge remaining afterwards, I burned it to dust when I killed you.”

A heavy, impossible breath lifted Han’s shoulders. “When I called your name and stepped out onto that walkway, I knew I wasn’t coming back,” he said, startlingly sincere for once. “But I did it because I had to at least try, and because you’re my _son_ and you always will be. You could kill me a dozen times and it wouldn’t change a damned thing. You had a home, Ben. You _have_ a home.”

Kylo’s reality was slipping out from between his fingers, draining somewhere out of his grasp. Trying to claw it back, he reached for what Snoke had always told him and began, “Killing you was supposed to—”

“Strengthen you, I know,” Han interrupted, as though he’d heard it all before. “But it didn’t, did it?” he asked, too gentle for his gruff voice. It was the kind of tone he’d use when crouching down to be at eye level with a sniffling Ben Organa, huddling under his bed because his parents were yelling at each other again. _Hey, there’s my bandit. It’s all right, see?_

“I just got weaker,” Kylo admitted, hardly above a whisper.

Han nodded, moving like he meant to stand by his side, then stilling as though thinking better of it. His voice grew rougher as he said, “I couldn’t have just left you to die on Starkiller Base, if that’s what you think.”

“Why?” Kylo bit out. Glowering at the ground, heat rising in his cheeks, he mumbled, “I was an awful son. You would have been glad to be rid of me.”

“Why?” Han repeated with a scoff. “Because I loved you from the moment I _knew_ about you, that’s why. Okay, maybe not the _exact_ moment; I had to do a bit of freaking out about the whole ‘being a dad’ and ‘responsibilities’ deal first. But when I realised that you were happening for real? I’d never loved anything more. You were going to be my little bandit, or my little angel, whichever.” A half-smile curled his mouth, and his voice softened as he continued, “Look, you don’t get a manual on how to be a parent. We didn’t know what we were doing. No one tells you, ‘you’re going to make a bunch of mistakes raising this thing’. Your Mom and I—we made mistakes. But we loved— _love_ —you more than anything.”

“Too much Vader. That’s what I heard you saying to M—General Organa, once.” Almost tripping over the word _Mother_ , Kylo stormed up to him, and the pang that gripped him at the way Han’s face fell shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. “I was eight. Eight, and I heard you say—I heard you say that about me. Like you’d given up on me already.” His fists clenched until they throbbed. A dam broke, and years of bottled-up resentment came cascading from his tongue, each syllable pointed as sharp as a barb. “That day on Eufornis Major with the assassin, when I was eleven; when I didn’t speak for two days—all I could hear was you saying, ‘there’s too much Vader in him’. Over and over. And when I shut my eyes, I saw myself do what I did over and over, and I thought there was something wrong with me, and you all but _confirmed it_ when you sent me away.”

Seconds dragged by as Han blinked and opened and closed his mouth, working to form a reply that would never be good enough. Kylo’s shoulders sagged, all the bitterness draining out of him like sludge, leaving him exhausted and aching down to the marrow. In its place came the gnawing, fight-or-flight urge to get away and the pressing feeling of being trapped: out of the viewport, the field of countless burning stars and shot silk nebulae was at once too vast and too claustrophobic, and outside his quarters, the ship teemed with thirty thousand other bodies, jostling and threatening to crowd him.

Kylo sank down onto the bed and folded up his too-long legs to cross them. His eyes were too hot, and he’d swear that he’d kill Han himself again if he dared look, if not for the fact that Han had always called him— _Ben—_ a terrible liar, usually with a laugh and a callused hand ruffling his mop of curls. Being dead, Kylo suspected, wouldn’t change that. “What kind of child has to be sent off like a broken thing to be fixed?” he whispered. “What kind of child _frightens_ his own parents?”

Before Han could respond, he screwed his eyes shut and built walls between himself and everything else, stubbornly trying to push himself into meditation. There were no ghosts there; no fathers and no lies. There, he could focus on his emotions, or make sense of them, and then feed from them the way Dark Side users were taught, and make himself stronger—

Distantly, as though from miles away, he heard Han remark, “The old ‘if I close my eyes, you can’t see me’ trick never worked even when you were young, kid.” A barely-there touch weighed on his shoulder for the briefest of moments, then withdrew, rays of warmth spreading over a palm-sized imprint. “I’m not going to abandon you, if that’s what you want. What you think you want. I’m not letting him make you into some kind of… disposable pawn.”

The _Finalizer_ was always cold, but as Han’s presence winked out, the temperature in his quarters dropped further. An unspoken _I’ll be back; I’ll always be back for you_ shivered in the air, as vivid as it would have been had it been voiced aloud, resounding in his ears and getting louder the more he tried to pretend that it wasn’t there.

Kylo didn’t intend to fall asleep, but the sight of the lovely, sad woman standing in front of him told him that he had.

She was familiar, like a favourite childhood dream. She shone as though lit from within, and she wore a gown sewn from water with all the galaxy’s rivers stitched in, embroidered with glittering threads in a dozen different blues and teals, rippling like fish scales as she moved. Though she held herself like a queen, she had no crown but the white flowers braided into the curls that flowed down her back.

“I feel like I’m watching history repeat itself,” she said softly, and at that, he smelled sulphur and salt, and could hear the licking and sizzling of fire. He recognised her then: he’d seen her face before, first in the grainy, flickering holovids Leia Organa had kept in her keepsake chest, and then in the holographs Luke Skywalker had stored in a drawer in his office, squirrelled away next to more images, ones of people Ben Organa had never seen before.

“Grandmother?” Kylo breathed, then furrowed his eyebrows. “How come you’ve come to talk to me and not Grandfather? Does he not—does he not want to see me?”

“He wants to,” Padmé Amidala told him, unaffected by the sweltering heat that swirled about them like chalk outlines, branding each inch of skin it brushed against. “More than anything there is in the universe, but something’s blocking him. He can get so far, and then comes across a wall that stands between you and him, keeping him from you. Watching you is breaking both of our hearts.” She clasped her hands to the centre of her chest as though feeling real, physical pain there. Over her heart lay a carved piece of ivory wood, dangling from a leather cord around her neck. “Anakin doesn’t want you to finish what he started as Vader. He wants you to finish what he started as Anakin.”

“Vader ceased to be Anakin when he turned,” Kylo said, echoing Snoke’s words, though perhaps they had been lies, too. “To turn to the Dark Side is to kill the person you were before. The same applies for the Light.”

“No,” Padmé replied. “You don’t stop being who you are when you turn to the Dark or to the Light. That’s one of the old mistakes, isn’t it, where both the Jedi and the Sith went wrong? I don’t know much about the Force, but—” she swept closer, as fluid as lakewater, and cupped his scarred cheek before gliding away with a half-smile, “—this is Ben Organa’s face, and it’s also Kylo Ren’s. Underneath, you are who you are. You were raised to remember Alderaan, Ben; you know the old stories about the power of a name.”

He could never have forgotten them, as childish as it sounded.

A lifetime ago, Leia had filled his head with Alderaanian folktales, keeping them nestled in a notebook, where she’d handwritten them in cursive High Galactic script. She’d spun them from her fingertips as she’d flipped the pages: stories about people stolen away and robbed of their identities, freed once somebody used their true name, or once they remembered it themselves if they’d been bewitched to forget; legends of tricksters outwitted when the heroine, after being given three days, guessed who or what they were; and myths of monsters that could only be slain if the brave hero sent to battle them shouted their true name.

“Ben Organa was named after Obi-Wan Kenobi, a good man. That means something, doesn’t it?” Padmé prompted, but before he could answer, her melodic voice took on a wistful note. “The last thing I ever did was name Luke and Leia, and I did so as a message to Anakin.”

Past the blackened volcanic rocks and the haze of flames surrounding them, Kylo saw a mirage of a man, young and grinning from ear to ear. In his arms were two little children, one golden-haired, chubby-cheeked, and clinging to his robes, the other darker, clever-eyed, and trying to wriggle out of his hold.

The three figures vanished, and Padmé took a longing glance at the space they’d occupied before continuing, “They’re from the old language of the Naboo, from before the days of the Galactic Republic. ‘She who creates the storm’ and ‘he who is a friend of peace’. Anakin would have known what I meant, and they reached him in the end. With my last breath, I _believed_ that they would.” She smiled again, and there was quiet triumph in it. “Just like I believe in Ben, and Kylo, and everything in between.”

Kylo scowled. There was nothing solid in his dream world; he needed something to crash his fists against. “There’s nothing to believe in. To claim otherwise is to insist on clinging to blind hope. Ben Organa is _dead._ ”

“Yes, he is,” Padmé said, without even flinching, “but not like I am.” She smiled at the bewildered knitting of his brows, her eyes sparkling as though she knew a secret. “Who you were before—that sweet, shy boy with his nose in a book and mud on his knees—is dead, and you wouldn’t be able to go back to being him even if you chose to leave Snoke. Not after all that’s happened. I think that would change a person, but it doesn’t mean that who you are now is who you are forever. It means that who you become is up to you.”

The fire guttered out, and where flames and hissing, jetting lava had been, colours emerged and took form, shaping themselves into walls and furnishings. Kylo realised where they were in an instant, his stomach lurching as though he’d plummeted from a great height.

Ben Organa’s old bedroom in Theed.

It had been preserved from a time before—the bed was unmade and the sheets were rumpled, as though Ben had simply clambered out of bed one morning and never returned. If Kylo allowed himself to look closer, he would see everything that he’d treasured back then, like a set of hand-painted model ships and a row of well-thumbed books; so many, their shelf almost sagged under their weight. Resting on his nightstand was an ornate wooden music box that played an Alderaanian lullaby, and in his mind, the phantom of its tune mingled with Leia’s low humming: _mirrorbright, shines the moon, its glow as soft as an ember._

Worst of all, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the damned growth chart. It had been his fa—Han’s idea, once he’d noticed that his son was determined to outgrow his clothes faster than they could be bought. One neat line had been scored in pencil for each year of Ben’s life, ending abruptly at the age of eleven, where he’d already grown an inch taller than Leia.

He needed to _wake up._

“There’s a legacy on your shoulders, I know,” Padmé said gently, her gown pouring like a rainstorm behind her as she crossed the room to stare out the window. “There was on mine, too.”

If he’d been born to any other family, Kylo thought, perhaps Snoke would never have taken an interest in him, not without the false promise of an approving grandfather to encourage him with. He watched the nostalgic flicker of her eyes tracing over the domed roofs, the marble statues, and the frothing waterfalls of the Solleu River, and it struck him that they were both ghosts on Naboo, visiting homes that were now barred to them. “I was told that you lost the will to live.”

Padmé braced her hands on the windowsill, her spine sloping willow-like. “And do you believe that?” she asked, without facing him.

Unhesitating, Kylo shook his head and answered, “No.” Even in a dream, Padmé Amidala seemed to be made up almost _entirely_ of hope and sheer force of will.

“Nor do I,” she replied, her voice a sigh. “I never imagined it going that way. I was just a girl in a queen’s clothes, and I wanted to fight; I wanted to _be._ I could have been more, or _done_ more, if I’d not died then. It was the most curious thing—I wanted to stay alive, but it was as if something or some _one_ was dragging me down. Not Anakin—I knew how he felt, and it wasn’t that. And then I was as good as forgotten,” she whispered, “and all that’s left of me is a tomb, Luke, and Leia, and you. Which is why I _know_ that you’re meant for more than this, just as I was.”

“How can you be so sure of what I’m meant for?”

She turned, river-swift, her mouth fixed in a firm line. “Because, Ben, there’s always a choice. Always.”

His grandmother gave him a final vision before her spirit faded away into the nebulous place ghosts went. A meadow unfurled behind his eyelids, bathed in light and carpeted in flowers that reached up as they bloomed, enveloping him in the scents of sunlit grass and warm earth-after-rain. Kylo stood, a stranger in a bedroom that was both his and not his, halfway to wanting to hear Han’s voice repeating _I’m not going to abandon you_ and _we love you_ until the words filtered in through the cracks in him and splintered him apart; until he could no longer tell what was a lie and what was the truth.

Around him, his dream shifted.

 

* * *

 

In Rey’s dream, the desert was hotter and more unforgiving than it had ever been.

Thirst scraped raw at her throat while her bone-dry lungs simmered in her chest, making each swallow a scratch and each breath a rasp. Every bare footfall burned as she trudged through the sand, and the dunes were endless, rolling on and on forever. Soon, she knew, she wouldn’t be able to drag herself to her next step, or to grit her teeth and force herself up if she fell—

Something strangely like a pair of hands—perfumed, warm, and water-soft, not like a scavenger’s roughened palms—seized her around her middle and _pulled_ her aside. Before her very eyes, the desert twisted around her as though chased away, and grass sprouted from the sand, hundreds of thousands of blades springing lush and green and alive beneath her feet. She heard the rumble of thunder, and a heavy, swollen-bellied sky met her when she looked up, just in time for it to pour with rain. Fat drops landed hard on her forehead and her upturned cheeks, forming little beads on her eyelashes.

Alinor’s summer showers were feeble trickles in comparison. It was Ahch-To’s ocean storms magnified tenfold, but it wasn’t her dream. The fit was all wrong for it to be hers—she was standing in an open space, but it felt too tight, like she’d been transported into somebody else’s memory and boxed in with thick sheets of rain.

A figure was stood a short few strides away from her, their shape hazy in the downpour as if shrouded in webs of gauze and spun mist. Rey squinted and shielded her brow to see better: they were cloaked in black, and their head was bowed low. She knew him, even if his back was turned to her.

She would _always_ know him.

“Stop the rain!” she called out to Kylo Ren, hoping that her voice would somehow carry over the deafening roar of thunder.

Ren whirled around. _Haunted_ was the only word that she could find to describe the way he stared at her: soaked tendrils of hair clung to his forehead, lavender circles ringed his eyes, and all the colour had drained from his narrow, mole-flecked face. His mouth worked for a moment, fumbling for a response, until he managed at last, “You shouldn't be here.”

“Well, I _am_ ,” Rey shot back, “and seeing as how I don’t know how to wake myself up, I’m stuck here and I’d rather you didn’t try to drown me—” A violent flash of lightning forked to the ground and interrupted her mid-sentence. Electricity shivered about her, darting static shocks down her spine and prickling goosebumps on her arms. She clenched her fists and yelled over another thunderclap, “It’s _your_ dream, Ren! Surely you can change something as small as the _weather!_ ”

The rain died out as soon as she’d finished speaking, a pinprick-sized blot of clear, calm blue sky blossoming until it had eclipsed every grey cloud, filling the landscape with light. The earth was damp and smelled of petrichor, like living things, and her heart skipped a beat as she took in her surroundings. She was somewhere achingly familiar, somewhere kept just out of her reach: a field freckled with too many flowers to count, with proud hills rising in the distance and the faraway babbling of a lake singing in her ears.

“I’ve been here before,” she murmured to herself, watching as an insect spread its bright, glass-patterned wings and took flight, soaring across the meadow.

Kylo Ren approached her, but she was not afraid, not even as she felt the heat of his eyes on her. “Skywalker hasn’t told you.”

Before she could correct him, a tiny green shoot by her feet caught her attention, nestled cosily inside itself. If she’d been awake, and if the real Ren had been near her, Rey wouldn’t have crouched down in the grass—which dried as if by magic the very instant she touched it—but she was in a dream, and she supposed that dreams didn’t need to make sense. She skimmed her fingers over the plant, feeling how it positively thrummed with sparks of life running from root to tip, and it quivered and split open. The stem unwound and followed her hand upwards as though spellbound, growing spines and jagged leaves until it had climbed as tall as her shoulders, and then a single bud bloomed. In the blink of an eye, it unfurled, revealing a star-shaped flower with petals painted like a sunset: purple bleeding to red, then fiery orange, then buttery yellow at the centre.

A pang of nostalgia struck her behind her ribs, sudden and sharp. She’d seen that flower before, or a different Rey had, one from a lifetime ago.

“Luke told me what he knew, but it wasn’t much,” she replied. “He said the parts he doesn’t know are yours to tell me.”

Ren remained still and silent, measuring her with his gaze, so she let her words hang in the air between them. Her thoughts were elsewhere, drifting back to her twentieth birthday, which had not long since passed. She hadn’t been expecting anything at all, but her friends—Finn, Poe, Jessika Pava, and then later Luke with a valiant attempt at a cake—had surprised her, piling gifts and sweet treats on her lap until all she could do was try not to cry with gratitude. Amongst the presents had been an actual paper book on the fauna and flora of the galaxy from Finn, complete with intricate, hand-drawn illustrations of each plant and creature, none any bigger than her thumb. Its pages were now dog-eared with use, their corners folded down on the planets that she wanted to visit the most.

She remembered the page that those flowers were on, what they could do, and where they were native to. Cupping the flower’s head in her palms, she tore a petal. Nothing happened for a moment, sowing a seed of doubt in her mind, until filaments stretched out from either side of the ripped petal and clasped as though joining hands, linking and becoming whole again. It was then that she knew where they were.

Kylo Ren was dreaming of Nysa, where Luke’s Praxeum had once been.

Rey looked up at him, gently releasing the flower—an amaranthine, she remembered, from the book and from a half-buried, half-there memory. “When you interrogated me, you told me that you’d prefer to be honest with me, so I want to know the truth. From the beginning.”

“I did,” Ren said. His mouth twitched with wry humour as he sat himself down opposite her, keeping a good distance between them. Avoiding her curious gaze and fidgeting with his large, pale hands, he began to talk, his speech stilted at first. “The Supreme Leader—Snoke had been speaking to me since I was a baby. In my earliest memories, before I could walk or talk, he’s there. It was only natural that I grew to trust him.” He’d spoken with an odd detachment before, as though recounting something that had happened to some other child, but it showed cracks as he went on, “He would tell me how wonderful, how _special_ I was, and in the next breath, he’d whisper things that felt true: my parents were afraid of me; _everyone_ was afraid of me, even those who didn’t know what I could do; being Darth Vader’s grandchild meant that I was both destined for power and a thing to be feared, in case I snapped one day.”

“And you believed him?”

His face darkened into a scowl. “I was given no reason not to,” he retorted, but the anger in it wasn’t directed at her, and his features softened once the words had left his mouth. “I had never been alone in my own mind,” he said, so quiet, she had to strain to hear. “His voice started out kind, like a children’s nursery rhyme or a lullaby, or like a friend. He knew everything about me without me needing to tell him. Even when I didn’t want to, he was easy to believe.”

“It’s hard to imagine having something like that in your head for all your life,” Rey murmured. It was a lie, she realised not a second later; that grave-cold voice had slithered into her ears, too, on Starkiller Base, and she’d felt it coiling about her, wanting to dig into her skull and take root there. She shook her head, a chill in her blood. “The Praxeum—why did you do it?”

“Snoke convinced me that the Jedi were a danger to the galaxy,” Ren answered, and Rey didn’t ask _how._ She suspected that she knew, from what Luke had told her on Ahch-To, about a slave boy from Tatooine and then a boy named Ben, born to teeter between Light and Dark. “My task before becoming something more—reaching my potential, he called it—was to kill every padawan at the Praxeum. It wouldn’t have been difficult, he said; none of them were as strong as I was. But even then, I was touched by sentiment. I bargained.” There was something strange about the words he used, as though they were somebody else’s, repeated to him over and over until he knew them by heart. “Snoke taught me how to sever a connection to the Force. He could never manage, not on sentients, but through him, I learned. When Skywalker left Nysa, I let Snoke’s men in and took the Force from those who refused to join us.”

Ducking his head, he focused intently on his hands. She’d never seen them bare before; they’d always been hidden away under a pair of gloves. They were—she couldn’t help but notice—unscarred, not like hers, but where her fingernails were clipped blunt, his were ragged, tooth-torn, the skin around them picked red and raw. “In a way,” he muttered, “what I did to them was worse than killing them. I presume some—Skywalker—will insist that I’m not ‘too far gone’ because I spared them. But I condemned them to a fate worse than death.”

Rey shook her head in disbelief. “How could it possibly be _worse_?” she demanded.

“You can feel everything in this meadow, can’t you? Even though none of it is real?” Ren asked, and when she nodded, he said, “Imagine living with the Force for so long, feeling it and everything and everyone around you, and then having it be taken away. It’s like losing a part of yourself—a part engraved deep in the very fibre of you—that can never be given back.” His fingers closed around a tuft of grass and ripped it up, scattering it about him in tattered shreds. “It would feel like a blank nothingness where there had once been the entire universe.”

He didn’t _know_ that the Force could be restored to those it had been stolen from. _How can he_ not _know?_ she wondered, her pulse racing, thumping in loud rabbit-jumps in her chest. _Is Snoke keeping it from him?_ Then, apprehensive: _do I tell him? Or will Snoke find out and put those people, wherever they are, in danger?_

“And… and what about me?” she asked instead, her voice tremulous.

“The Sup—Snoke would have had no use for a five-year-old, and none of the new or old Knights of Ren were willing to find a place for you if I severed your connection to the Force.” She’d been expecting it ever since Ahch-To, but really _hearing_ it—some of the people who’d known her as a child had wanted her dead; even _they_ hadn’t wanted her—knifed through her all the same, and she caught Ren’s slight wince and the smallest shake of his head as he said, “I assured them that you’d be dealt with. While the others left to meet with Snoke, I took you away.”

All the hurt came rushing out of her then, as she thought of how utterly terrified she must have been, and how they’d just decided to end her life as though she meant nothing. “Is that what happened?” she spat, hating the falter in her voice for showing him how wounded she was. “You left me on Jakku to die because you couldn’t face killing me yourself?”

Kylo Ren blinked, his surprise fading into a weariness that seemed to have seeped to his bones. “No,” he replied, after a pause of several heartbeats. “I left you on Jakku so you’d _live._ ”

“What?”

“I didn’t—I didn’t deposit you in the sands and leave without giving you a second thought.” Stealing a glance at her, Ren quickly darted his gaze to his hands, repeatedly tightening them into fists and then relaxing them. “You were… important to me. You were meant to be housed. Fed. Watered. Given clean clothes.” He gulped down a harsh swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “ _Loved._ By someone.” His fingers raked through his hair, still soaked into a rain-beaded tangle. “I heard my—Han Solo once say that the desert is the best place to hide something; another time, he mentioned rich merchants on Jakku. I trusted that Unkar Plutt would keep his word when I demanded that he find you somewhere safe to live if he valued his life, and I—I bartered all the credits I owned and two gifts from my mo—General Organa with him in return. There was still a stupid, _foolish_ part of me that thought I could come back, so I blocked your memories instead of erasing them.”

Rey opened her mouth a fraction, but nothing that made any sense would come out, as though all her words had jammed in her throat, piled in a haphazard mess of consonants and vowels. He—fourteen years old and more naïve at that age than she’d been—had truly believed that she’d be treated well on Jakku and that Unkar Plutt would keep his end of their bargain, but she knew Plutt. She knew how he’d had no qualms about sending thugs after his scavengers, or doling out just enough rations for a sore-bellied kind of survival. He’d likely sold Ben Organa’s things and spent his earnings—on what, she didn’t care to guess.

“If I’d been less of a fool—if I’d known—I’d have taken you somewhere else,” Ren added, a thickness in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “Coruscant, maybe, or somewhere…” He trailed off, stifling whatever he’d been about to say, but she could hear it ringing in her mind as clearly as if he’d said it aloud: _somewhere green._

“Your ‘ifs’ won’t do any good,” she told him when she could find it in herself to speak again, a traitorous higher pitch creeping into her voice. “Yes, you believed, but Plutt never held up his end of the deal. And what happened? I spent every day having to scavenge through wrecks just to gather enough salvage to be able to _eat._ I saw people die; I saw more bodies than I could count; I’ve probably seen more death than you’ve _caused.”_ Rey forced in a shaky inhale, vaguely, distantly aware—as though it belonged to someone else—that her heart was slamming against her ribs, fit to break free. “I remember one boy, a bit older than I was—he disturbed a nest of steelpeckers, great ugly birds with razor-sharp beaks and talons as hard as iron, and they ripped him to shreds. There was nothing anyone could do. And my home? My only home was an AT-AT walker so riddled with booby traps, it would have _killed_ anyone else trying to step foot in it.”

Fighting to even the rapid rise and fall of her breathing, she met his eyes as levelly as she could muster, a flicker of satisfaction sparking inside her as he held her gaze. He was many things—a murderer, her enemy, her childhood friend, and the man now linked with her in ways that neither he nor Luke could explain—but he was no coward. “So, don’t ‘if’ me, Kylo Ren; it happened and we’re both going to have to live with it.”

For a moment, Ren said nothing. She could almost _see_ his brain replaying everything she’d told him, imagining it in crisp colour, a peculiar mix of anger and regret flaring his nostrils and blanching milk-white spots on his knuckles. “Unkar Plutt,” he began, too calm. “Is he still on Jakku?”

“ _Killing_ him won’t do _anything!_ ” Rey burst out.

Ren quirked up an eyebrow. “Would that not be appropriate retribution?”

“Of _course_ it wouldn’t,” she exclaimed. “R’iia’s breath, I’ve thought about it—pretty much every time he gave me fewer rations than I earned—and I bet every other scavenger around Niima Outpost has, too. Not that they’d even manage; he’s guarded by goons strong enough to snap their necks like twigs,” she admitted. “But it wouldn’t change anything, not now.”

Kylo Ren’s lips twitched ever so slightly. “You’re more like me than you realise.”

Rey scowled, ready to strike with an acid-tongued retort— _I’ll never be like you_ or _I’m twice the person you are_ —but then frowned and froze those thoughts before they could leap from her mouth, accepting that there was truth in them. She couldn’t bring herself to lie, not even in a dream: there was as much darkness in her as there was in him, but Luke hadn’t wanted her to be afraid of it.

“I know I could be like you,” she said instead, her quiet words almost engulfed by the breeze whispering through the grass, “and it might make me feel better for a bit if I did kill him. I _did_ hate him. But what if I go to Jakku and I get past his thugs, and then I tear him limb from limb? What if I replied, ‘yes, he’ll still be on Jakku, where he was fifteen years ago’ and you brought me his head? Will that alter history so that he found me the house, clothes, food, and _love_ you wanted me to have, _Ben?”_

He reacted to that name as she’d predicted, flinching as though she’d slapped him. His broad back bowed with a defeated sigh and he turned his face away to the side, so she seized the opportunity to unabashedly examine the scar she’d marked him with.

When the ground had split apart between them on Starkiller Base, she’d stumbled out of the adrenaline fog of battle and left him with a furious red gash cleaving down the curve of his cheek, paled a stark, bloodless winter-white in comparison. In the months since then, it had faded to a pearl-pink slice, skimming the root of his aquiline nose and missing his eye by a hairsbreadth. Somehow, she knew that if he were to hook a finger in his collar and pull it aside, she’d see the scar trailing all the way to his clavicle, and that if she were to reach forwards, slow and careful, and run the pad of a finger down it, it would feel smooth to the touch. Childishly, she wondered if he could still grow a beard, or if it had changed how he smiled—if he _did_ smile.

Almost everywhere in the galaxy, save the most backwater of junkheaps, had technologies and treatments that could wipe his face blank like a slate, or fill in chinks and cracks with synthskin, but it looked like it had been left alone. The First Order surely had access to medical facilities that would rival even the New Republic’s, so why hadn’t he had it healed? Was it on Snoke’s command, or had Ren growled like a wounded nexu and batted away anyone who’d tried to come near it with bacta?

“Does it hurt?” she asked, gesturing to her own right cheek.

“No,” Ren answered shortly. “Not that one.”

He had another mark, this one on his neck, raw and recent. Rey narrowed her eyes at it, an ice-cold shiver of realisation wriggling up her spine: earlier, as she’d been training, she’d felt a sudden jolt of burning pain in the exact same place, as though she’d been wounded herself. Cursing loud enough to startle Luke, she’d clamped a hand to her tender neck, and when she’d hurried to a mirror, the skin there had been unblemished. _The bond,_ she’d thought grimly, _but what_ is _he doing?_

“What about that one, the one on your neck?”

“I was too slow to dodge when sparring today. My opponent must have taken that momentary lapse to mean that she could best me in a real duel.” As Rey’s eyebrows knit in confusion, Ren elaborated, “It’s our way. Should the Master of the Knights of Ren become too weak, or otherwise unfit to lead, another may challenge them.” His fingers were tapping an anxious rhythm on his knees—one of _her_ nervous habits, she noticed. “I’ve disappointed Snoke too many times—he has asked me to kill Skywalker and commanded that you be destroyed or converted, and yet—”

“Challenge them?” Rey interrupted. “In a fight?”

“To the death,” he replied, his features schooled impassive, as though he’d thought about it so much, he’d eroded it, wearing it down and rounding it at the corners. “If I fail him once more, he may replace me with Enyo Ren. She’s under the illusion that I’ll _allow_ it, but until then, I am the Supreme Leader’s apprentice and I—I must do as he asks of me.”

“How can you live like that? Fighting for your life against your own teammates, and—” She broke off, and then it became all too obvious, like a curtain behind her eyes lifting. “And—this is how it’s going to be?” she demanded, clenching her fists until her nails bit little pink half-moons into her palms. She couldn’t hate him anymore, but she hated what would happen if she killed him: she’d be made into a killer and people would celebrate her for it, and most unfair of all, Leia and Luke would have to see it. They’d be forced to grieve in silence, with no one willing to hear their loss.

_Can’t you see that I don’t want to kill you?_ she tried to say but couldn’t, hoping that he could at least catch the flimsiest wisp of that thought. “We keep meeting on planet after planet in battle after battle, having fights that barely even _look_ like fighting, and I’m supposed to accept—” Her voice hitched, and she heaved in a long, shuddering breath before straightening her shoulders and looking him in the eye. “I’m supposed to accept that one day I’ll have to kill you? That you’re some sort of thing-gone-wrong, some sort of _creature_ to be put down and forgotten about?”

Kylo Ren’s lips parted as though he was about to speak; he stared at her in that wide-eyed way he had when Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber had sailed into her hands, like a man with one foot out of a dream. “How long can we fight against the inevitable?” he asked, with quiet resignation in his voice. “A boy named Ben couldn’t.”

“You don’t get it, do you? If I kill you, Snoke will have won; everything he’s wanted for you will have come true,” Rey insisted. “And I don’t know how these… _bond_ things are supposed to work, and neither does Luke. What if one of us dying means that the other dies, too? I can already feel your pain from light-years away, and you can probably feel mine, and now I’ve been sucked into your dreams.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Ren blurted out, the vast oceans of grass around them quaking at his raised voice. “If I knew a way to break this bond that didn’t involve stripping either of us of the Force, I would do it. It’s far more dangerous than you think—you don’t understand how hard I have to try to keep it from Snoke. How he’d stop at nothing to get to you if he knew.”

“Oh, I’m in danger? I’d never have guessed,” Rey muttered. Dropping the sarcasm, she persisted, “But you could still leave and come home.” She was thinking mainly of Leia, who seemed to be shrinking under the weight of her own worry, fearing that the first and last time she’d ever see her son as a grown man would be when he was dead, whether it ended up being by their doing or by Snoke’s. “I want my memories back, and—”

“I can’t go back.”

“Why can’t you?”

Ren cocked one black eyebrow, almost as if expecting her to be making a joke, and said dryly, “I was never one for party games as a child, not least ‘Pin the Blaster Bolts on the Defecting, Patricidal Enemy’, which I suspect is what I’d be invited to if I ever did go back. Or maybe it’d be lightsabers,” he added in an undertone. “Would you like to cut my head off yourself, Rey? They might let you keep it as a trophy; I imagine that I’d look nice on your wall.”

“Shut _up!”_ Rey leapt up, her fists balled at her sides. “I’m not—I’m not killing you, or keeping _any_ part of you as a trophy.” Anger was rising in her chest, thick and flare-hot, and unless she was seeing things, grey skies were moving in, and dense, overfed clouds were massing above her. Tasting bitter on her tongue, she tightened her jaw against the first raindrop that splashed against her forehead and said, as firm as she could, “Your mother is Leia Organa; she—”

“You’re stubborn, aren’t you?”

“Try living on Jakku without being stubborn and you’ll be dead within a week,” she snipped back.

Kylo Ren made no move to stand, and his voice was brittle and hollow as he asked, “What good would me coming home do for the galaxy?” Rain clung to his eyelashes, sticking them together in black spikes. “Would it revive the people I’ve killed? Restore the Force to those I robbed of it?” As he shook his head, a wild shower of water droplets flew from the tips of his hair. “You and I both know what would happen: I would receive the death penalty, or I’d be kept imprisoned for the rest of my life. A cell with scheduled meals, no sharp objects, and a guard to escort me to a sonic shower every day, perhaps. If they were feeling particularly kind, they might exile me or keep me on house arrest with a tracking chip strategically placed where I can’t rip it out without cutting somewhere vital. What kind of life would that be? With Snoke, I—I have a purpose. To bring peace and order to the systems.”

Rey almost laughed. He didn’t believe a thing he was saying; it was like he was reading lines from a script—but what had changed?

“You’re right,” she said, taking a step back in the wet grass. “Being trapped and unable to leave is no life at all.” She kept her eyes on him, pinpointing with an expert’s precision the exact moment it clicked, when he would no longer meet her gaze.

Halfway across the galaxy, across mazes upon mazes of moons and winking stars, Rey snapped awake with her heart pounding and a sheen of cold sweat drying on her skin. Grimacing, bleary eyes adjusting to the dim, salmon-streaked light of Alinor’s dawn, she massaged her sore neck, her fingers lingering on the spot where Kylo Ren had been hit while sparring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, thank you _so_ much to everybody who takes the time to read or leave a kudos or a comment!
> 
> [Dromund Kaas](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dromund_Kaas) is a planet in the Sith Worlds, and I'm basing my descriptions of it on the time I spent playing _Star Wars: The Old Republic._ Its [Dark Force Temple](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_Force_Temple) is the site of a [Force nexus](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_nexus), a place where the Force is unusually strong.
> 
> [Marks of Contact](http://files.enjin.com.s3.amazonaws.com/70955/module_gallery/original/274690.jpg) are areas of the body that a lightsaber-wielder may try to strike at in order to end a duel. Some will disarm the opponent or injure them, while others will kill them.
> 
> A [Darkshear](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darkshear), also known as a "spear of midnight black", allows a Force-user to assemble an invisible spear out of Dark Side energy, which will injure/kill their opponent like a real spear.
> 
> While the names of Ankou, Charon, Enyo, Nox, Pollux, and Phobos come from mythology and folklore, Saarai and Siqsa mean "truth" and "demon" respectively in the [Sith language](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sith_\(language\)).


	3. Steel from Glass

Sleep evaded Kylo Ren that night, and for once, it wasn’t his own mind keeping him awake, it was  _Rey’s._

Across the galaxy, she was a maelstrom, tossing and turning against the blossoming peach-gold light of dawn pouring through her window. Her thoughts were going everywhere and nowhere, zipping in irregular paths like haphazard arrows: here were several discarded attempts at figuring out just how she felt about him leaving her on Jakku, and there were almost fifteen minutes spent weighing up every part of herself with a scavenger’s keen eye and wondering if she  _did_ have it in her to kill Unkar Plutt, if she wanted to. Most of all, she  _ached_ for her memories of the Praxeum. Though he was light-years away, he could feel a dim echo of that ache, heavy as a brick in his belly.

Try as she might, she simply couldn’t picture herself back then. From the fleeting, blink-and-you’d-miss-it snapshots he caught of her, fluttering across the silver and gold threads that linked them, it was proving as impossible as imagining a whole new colour.

He could give her memories to her the next time they met on a battlefield, he thought; a press of his bare fingertips against her forehead and they’d come flooding back to her in ultra-bright technicolour, and she’d be in a thousand places all at once. Maybe then he’d allow her to strike him, if she wanted, not to change anything but as an offering, letting her satisfy herself with the splitting of skin and the crunching of bone.

As their bond thrummed between them, pulsing like a living thing, he debated talking to her.  _You could be like me but you choose not to be,_ he’d tell her,  _that’s the difference between us, what makes you good._

 _But I’m_ not _good,_ she’d insist, and she’d set her jaw or narrow her eyes in a familiar scowl.  _All I want is to do the right thing._

 _I did, too._ Your  _version of the ‘right thing’ hasn’t been exposed as a lifelong lie,_ he’d counter, his voice thin with resentment. To that, she’d have no response, but she might draw back, curl inwards, and think of the lie that had kept her on Jakku.

In the end, knowing that the very last thing she needed was for him to waltz into her mind uninvited, Kylo stayed silent, watching the neon-lit hours trudging by on his chronometer and the stars drifting past the viewport.

When he’d been a fool of a boy, all rosy-red cheeks, skinned knees, and an untameable mop of crows-nest hair, he’d sat in the  _Millennium Falcon_ ’s cockpit and beamed at the field of stars blooming before him. That day, he’d thrown his arms wide, felt limitless, and announced that he wanted to visit  _every_ planet there was, but now, there was nowhere for him to go. In a strange, distant way, it comforted him to see—or rather, feel, as though she herself were a spectre in his quarters—that he and Rey had unknowingly shuffled into a mirror image of the other’s position in the night. Two spines curved like crescent moons, one waxing and the other waning, both clutching their too-cold blankets against their chest.

One question still niggled at him. How had she gotten into his dream to begin with?

She certainly hadn’t  _chosen_ to be there, not unless her natural state of being teetered somewhere between ‘grudging pity’ and ‘doing her best not to punch him’. He didn’t remember pulling her in, so had it been the ghosts? He could almost  _see_ Padmé Amidala, draped in her glittery gown of lakes and oceans and shaking her head of curls and white flowers, sweeping in like rushing river rapids to pluck Rey from wherever it was that she went when she slept. Or had it been the bond, working in ways neither of them could ever hope to understand?

His dreams were hazy when he managed to will himself into a kind of half-asleep doze at last. In them, Han Solo plummeted from the catwalk on Starkiller Base again and again. Each time, Kylo hesitated for the briefest of moments before pressing his lightsaber’s activation switch, and each time, Han’s trembling, callused palms carved an invisible scar on his cheek, until a voice snaked into his ears and he lurched awake.

Where his ghosts radiated warmth, the voice was made of a bitter grave-chill, dropping the temperature in his quarters enough to prickle gooseflesh on his arms. As it spoke, it swamped his head with twining tendrils of icy smoke and bottomless black, so dark, not a single slat of light could peek through.  _Snoke,_ he told himself firmly; he couldn’t bring himself to call him  _Supreme Leader,_ not anymore.

 _Come to my audience chamber, Kylo Ren,_ Snoke murmured.  _I wish to speak with you._

Kylo’s eyes snapped open, and as suddenly as it had appeared, Snoke’s presence was gone.

Swiping a hank of sweat-dampened hair away from his clammy forehead and untangling himself from his bedsheets, he swore, hissing a harsh  _sithspit!_ to anybody who might have been listening—Han, or Padmé, or Anakin Skywalker, or even Darth Revan, for all he knew. He moved as though still stuck in a dream as he washed and dressed, functioning as if on autopilot as he slammed on his helmet and shoved his feet into a pair of boots splattered with dried mud from Dromund Kaas. Outside the viewport, oblivious nebulae swirled like spun sugar.

Half of him itched to grit his teeth, seize his  _Upsilon_ -class command shuttle, storm through the marshy jungles of Dromund Kaas until he reached the Dark Force Temple, and slice Snoke clean in two, daring Enyo Ren to doubt him then. He’d die trying, he knew: once, he’d fought not to gag as Snoke killed a man without laying a finger on him. Snoke had squeezed his gaunt fists tight as vices, doing  _something_ crushing to the heart and all the branching veins and arteries, and as the man had sagged to the floor, boneless and bloodless, Kylo had seen himself there instead. The other half of him, clawing and desperate, wanted to scream his throat raw, pound his knuckles against a wall until they bruised, and bend everything solid in sight to warped, mangled scraps.

Like a fool, like the weak, idiot child he’d claimed not to be, he’d been confessing his innermost thoughts to a lie—not just any lie, but one crafted to appeal to only him. A lie that had stood submerged in shadows, watched a lonely boy yearning for approval and for somebody to make him feel as though he belonged, and outstretched a spidery-boned hand, promising to give him what he needed.

When Darth Vader had gifted him with visions and whispered  _keep going don’t stop shun the Light shut it out,_ it had really been Snoke, dragging him deeper down.

He could vomit.

Stormtroopers averted their eyes as he thundered down the  _Finalizer’_ s hallways. Some halted mid-step to avoid crossing his path, while others made what might have been the universe’s most unsubtle double-takes, pivoting on their heels and hurrying to complete a forgotten task at the opposite end of the ship. There was always a palpable shift in the atmosphere as he approached: the air hummed with fear so thick and tense, he could scythe right through it. It crackled against him like the static before lightning, knife-sharp on his tongue.

Snoke couldn’t know that he’d discovered the truth of Vader’s helmet, and nor could he find out that Kylo could see the ghosts. They were a temptation, but more importantly, they were a mark of his failure—if he could see them, it meant that he hadn’t banished the Light that had formed them.

Kylo didn’t keep many secrets from his master. It was almost impossible; Snoke could slip through the chinks in his mental defences as easily as though Kylo’s mind was his home, and Kylo himself was a mere visitor. Those he  _had_ kept, like the bond and his choice to whisk Rey from Nysa fifteen years ago, were buried where none would think to look, shrunk to the size of pinpricks and locked up in boxes so secure, Snoke would have to pry them open with all the strength left in him.

His pulse was an anxious skitter in his throat as he lingered outside the audience chamber. As carefully as he could, Kylo took his memories of the past day—Padmé gazing out of Ben Organa’s old bedroom window, her eyes tracing Theed’s marble statues and turquoise domed rooftops; the impossible,  _human_ heat of Han’s palm on his shoulder; and Luke Skywalker bathed in the glow of flames as tall as he was—and deadbolted them away.

Snoke was waiting for him when he stepped inside, his flickering hologram lit up an eerie, ghost-like blue, dust motes dancing around him in shimmery streams. Weak rays of silvery light haloed him and spilled over the crown of Kylo’s head as he knelt before the throne, digging his fingertips into the ground to centre himself.

“Unmask for me, Kylo Ren,” Snoke ordered, once Kylo had righted himself. “I want to see the true face of my apprentice.”

Ignoring the way his hands shook as he unfastened the catches on his helmet, lifted it free, and placed it by his feet, Kylo hastened to scrub himself clean of all emotion before looking back up at Snoke. He’d always hated how every feeling showed on his face, clear as mirrorglass. Worse, he hated how his memory took it upon itself to jump backwards in time to Leia Organa, flashing a wry half-smile and remarking that he—no,  _Ben_ —always darted his eyes to the side when about to tell a lie, and how he’d tried to stop himself from doing it for weeks afterwards.

He pushed that thought away as though it had scalded him, letting himself feel a shred of relief to see that Hux was nowhere to be seen. Hux would hone in on any hints of vulnerability and feast on them, all the while near enough oozing contempt.

“I must commend you for your prowess against Enyo Ren yesterday, however…  _unorthodox_ your decision to grant her mercy might have been for a Knight of Ren,” Snoke continued, pausing as if to savour the feel of the word  _unorthodox_ rolling off his tongue. His pale eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and Kylo pretended not to hear the scornful lilt souring his voice.

_(Pollux Ren’s body slumped to the ground, and the dull thud of the impact ricocheted in Kylo’s ears until he was sure that it had been engraved somewhere in his brain, scored into him so that he’d remember it even decades later. He switched off his lightsaber, and as the sweat-and-salt tang of battle overwhelmed him, it was as though he’d been snapped out of a deep sleep, becoming aware of how hard his chest was heaving and how ragged his breaths were as they tore out of him. He’d killed before—of course he had—but he’d never struck down anyone he’d known for so long; he’d never fought alongside a person and then watched as the life faded out of their eyes._

_Somewhere that sounded like miles away, Nox Ren with his newly-scarred face let out a low whistle, and Phobos Ren shifted from foot to foot, muttering something about building pyres for both Pollux and Saarai. A proper Knight’s funeral. They’d burn their helmets, too, resting them atop their pyres and scattering the ashes._

_In front of him, past where Pollux lay, the Supreme Leader’s tented fingers unfurled, a slow smile spreading across his ruined face.)_

“Thank you, Master.”

“I have one final test for you.” Snoke leaned forwards, giving Kylo the uncanny sensation of being examined. “It will prove your unwavering loyalty to me, and with its successful execution, your training will be complete.”

Kylo nodded. “Whatever you ask of me.”

Doubt curled the corners of Snoke’s scarred mouth—perhaps he felt something growing in Kylo; the tiniest seed of dissent taking root—but he went on regardless, “Reliable sources have informed the First Order that in one standard week, General Organa of the Resistance will be on Corellia, attending talks with the New Senate.” A note of disdain wormed its way into his voice, and the crepe-thin skin over his knuckles blanched as he gripped the arms of his throne. It, along with everything else on Dromund Kaas, was so old, Kylo imagined it shattering in Snoke’s hand, splintering into jagged fragments of stone. “It seems they are far more inclined to listen to her after her warnings before the firing of Starkiller Base were proved correct. They are determined not to allow what they have dubbed the ‘Hosnian Cataclysm’ to defeat them.”

“A time-bomb has been planted within the Senate Building, designed to assassinate both Organa and the rest of the attending senators. I need not tell you the  _countless_ opportunities that this would open for us.” Over the furious tattoo of his heartbeat, drumming a march in his ears, Kylo almost didn’t hear Snoke say, “Your orders, Kylo Ren, are to go to Corellia. If Organa still lives—if she has evaded the explosion or failed to perish in it—you must kill her yourself.”

_Mother._

For a moment, it was all he could think, thumping  _moth-er, moth-er, moth-er_ in time with his pulse. He thought of her ladalum perfume, made from those big, full Alderaanian flowers with the frilled red petals that only came into bloom if other native plants were nearby. He thought of flour dusted up to her elbows and their disastrous attempts at baking together, an ornate silver and mother-of-pearl hairbrush she’d gently run through his mess of hair, a firm-set mouth and dark, shrewd eyes, a long braid cascading down her back, and a posture that seemed at odds with her size.

Most shorter people stood with their spines held straight, trying to look and feel larger than they were. Not Leia Organa. She let herself slouch as she pleased, as if she already knew that she was the tallest being in the room.

“I know this must be difficult for you,” Snoke was telling him from somewhere far away, his tone reeking of false concern and yet more lies. There was a harsh glint in his immense, watchful eyes, one Kylo didn’t want to name. “She  _is_ your mother, after all, is she not?”

Recognising the test in an instant, Kylo found himself able to speak again. “No,” he rasped automatically, clearing his throat and moving a step forwards. “She was Ben Organa’s mother, not mine. She means nothing to me.”

To an eavesdropping outsider, Kylo’s face would have appeared a flawless picture of detachment, but Snoke saw through him as he always did. “You still have sentiment for your family,” he said, diagnosing him with cutting precision. The fingertips of one hand tapped against the back of the other, where a star map of blue veins and fragile bones poked out. “Yet I have done more for you than they ever could. Have I not raised you myself, Kylo Ren?” he asked, cocking his head. “Have I not made steel from glass and sculpted you into something more than Ben Organa could have ever been?”

Kylo bowed his own head and, privately, dug his bitten nails into his palms, ensuring that there would be little pink slices etched into the flesh there when he tugged off his gloves. “I am forever grateful, Supreme Leader.”

Snoke relaxed, mollified by his apprentice’s display of obedience. “Organa’s death will truly snuff out the Light within you,” he said, an approving smile twisting his lips into a predator’s bared-teeth snarl. He spoke as though describing a fantasy of his, one he hadn’t yet realised that Kylo didn’t share: how many times had he been assured that his next act would smother the stubborn Light blazing inside him, and how many times had he whispered to Darth Vader’s helmet that it still called for him? “With her and Skywalker dead, and his scavenger padawan turned or… disposed of, if need be, Ben Organa will have been destroyed.”

“Yes, Master,” Kylo replied, though the words made his stomach churn just to voice aloud. “It will be done.”

“See to it that it is.”

With that, Snoke’s enormous hologram guttered out, leaving Kylo alone and the audience chamber empty, cold, and dark, save for the feeble stream of light filtering in and reaching for him with soft, silvery fingers. Somebody had sucked all the air from his lungs, and the only sounds that would fall from his mouth were a series of bizarre, strangled gasps that were  _not_ sobs; he refused to be so pathetic as to  _sob,_ like a  _child._

A child who knew their mother was about to die.

Unmoored, his head spinning and bile rising hot in his throat, Kylo lurched and stumbled forwards and down, until the smack of his knees against the ground jolted him back to reality. Why couldn’t he bear the thought of killing Leia Organa? He’d killed Han Solo— _I killed my father,_ he let himself think in horror at last, and it was even more awful than he’d expected—so what difference did another murdered parent make?

 _We loved—_ love— _you more than anything,_ Han’s voice echoed in his mind, preserved pitch-perfect from the day before.

_(“Mom, I love you this much,” Ben Organa proclaimed out of nowhere, hovering his hand above his head and stretching it as high as it would go._

_Leia’s smile crinkled the outer corners of her eyes. “Well, I love you_ this  _much,” she told him, mirroring him, but she had been much taller than him back then._

 _Not to be outdone, Ben pointed out the window, up at Naboo’s deepening twilight, painted the colour of a ripened plum and streaked in gold, and exclaimed, “Then I love you all the way up to the sky!” He was four years old and, according to Leia,_ far  _too young for either Han, Chewie, or Luke to let him anywhere near the_ Falcon _’s cockpit or co-pilot’s seat, thank you very much, so he couldn’t fathom anything higher._

_“Ah, but I love you up to the biggest moon, little bandit.” Leia ruffled his untidy hair. “And all the way back.”_

_Ben frowned thoughtfully, peering up at the fullest of Naboo's three moons, a dove’s egg nesting atop a star-framed bed of gilded clouds. That_ was  _very far, he decided, almost impossibly so. If the weird voice had overheard that—if it had heard that Mom did love him, all the way up to the biggest moon and then all the way back—it might stop telling him cruel things about her and Dad while he huddled under the blankets, squeezing his eyes shut.)_

Corellia. As he stood, his thoughts flitted back to forbidden things from years ago, to Han Solo’s trusty maps of the galaxy and a gruff, almost amused voice asking,  _kid, it’s only a day and a half’s trip to Kashyyyk, do you need_ that  _many books?_

Snoke had said that Organa’s meeting would take place in one standard week—five days from now. If he remembered correctly, from those old star maps, the journey from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds took four days, give or take a few hours. Organa would be preparing to leave soon, which meant that he didn’t have much time.

Kylo refused to think of the alternative, of her having already left.

Loosening his aching fists, Kylo put his helmet back on with an eerie calm. His feet seemed to carry him to the  _Finalizer_ ’s bridge of their own accord: he made no conscious, measured choice to go there, but something in him told him that he  _had_ to, and so he strode with a renewed feeling of purpose, with one goal consuming him. Low-ranking members of personnel suppressed gulps at the sight of him stalking through the corridors with his tattered cowl billowing behind him, their wary eyes tracking his every movement.

Perhaps it was luck, or perhaps the Force was on his side, but he found what he was looking for almost immediately: a squat, balding major, barking orders to a group of fresh-faced petty officers, whose dulled expressions betrayed that they’d rather be anywhere else.  _Ursus,_ Kylo thought, plucking the name from the very outskirts of the major’s head, not quite delving in enough to be noticed. Like every other officer in the First Order’s military, Ursus wore a rank insignia on his arm, embroidered with the name of an important Imperial figure— _heroes,_ Hux had called them, though Hux’s idea of a hero was dubious at best. Ursus’s bore the name  _Tarkin,_ sewn in blocky Aurebesh.

Grand Moff Tarkin had been arrogant enough to get himself blown up on the Death Star when he ought to have evacuated. Kylo just had to hope that Major Ursus had more common sense than that.

“Major Ursus. Come with me.”

Whatever Ursus’s next set of commands were meant to have been, they died in the middle of a sentence, and all the colour drained from his ruddy cheeks and disappeared somewhere underneath his crisp collar. In any other circumstances, Kylo might have quashed a snort, but he could feel the major’s nervousness like a physical entity wedged between them, bleeding into him and weighing leaden on his chest. Unable to say  _no,_ not to Kylo Ren, Ursus followed him into a nearby empty conference room. As soon as the door had slid shut behind them, a minute flick of Kylo’s wrist disabled all surveillance equipment and—

—hoisted Ursus up with the Force, lifted him to be at eye level, and hurled him towards a wall, stopping him just short of the impact. Ursus hung in mid-air, his feet dangling and his head mere millimetres away from crashing into solid durasteel. He could only struggle, his arms and legs jerking to no avail.

“What,” Kylo growled, “do you know of the planned assassination attempt on General Organa of the Resistance?”

For several seconds, all that Ursus’s mouth would do was open and close in terror like a fish’s, until a garbled sound tumbled out. It was too mangled to be any word that Kylo recognised, its consonants and vowels muddled into a slapdash heap. Kylo dragged in a quaking breath through his teeth, cursing himself for leaping straight to such intense intimidation tactics: it was an amateurish mistake, and he should have long since improved. He wasn’t that quivery-voiced  _boy_ anymore, blundering into unready minds with all the grace of a newborn bantha.

Pushing into Ursus’s mind, Kylo sifted and searched until he found what he needed. Years of performing interrogations for the First Order—for  _Snoke—_ had taught him how and where to zero in, and that it was easy once he knew where to look. He had no interest in any of Ursus’s other, irrelevant thoughts or the flare-quick fragments of memories flashing by, each scattering past him like a broken string of beads.

There: Organa’s meeting with the New Senate would begin in five days, scheduled for 11:00 hours. At exactly 11:25, accounting for any latecomers, the time-bomb would detonate and, if successful, kill Organa and everybody else present. If anything failed—if she was still alive, despite the odds—Kylo was to trudge through the wreckage and end her life himself.

Kylo took an involuntary step backwards and swallowed hard, disgust filling his mouth and curdling his stomach—disgust at the First Order, at Snoke, at himself. Ursus had paled a sick, dead white, and seemed unable to even speak; he looked as though he’d slump down in a faint if not for the Force keeping him pinned to the wall. His face was frozen into a rigid mask of fear that Kylo knew all too well, his eyes locked on Kylo’s visor and his pupils blown fat enough to eclipse all but the smallest sliver of iris.

 _I truly am a monster,_ Kylo thought distantly.  _A creature in a mask._

No wonder the children who’d once been his friends had shied away from him as they grew.

It felt alien to remember having friends now, but there had been a time when he had, years ago—he used to race home from playing with them in the meadows, sporting grass stains smeared on his knees and elbows, and a bright beam that stretched from ear to ear. One by one, without giving him an explanation and without so much as an apology, they’d started to avoid him until he’d been left with nobody. Later, while he lay curled up in his bunk at Skywalker’s Praxeum, Snoke had crawled into his thoughts and made sure to remind him of how jealous they’d been. Always there and always watching, Snoke had told him how they’d despise him if they learned of the incident on Eufornis Major, describing in vivid, crushing detail how they’d back away with hate in their eyes and the words  _dangerous_ and  _just like Vader_ spitting poison from their lips.

He’d been raised in the precarious peace of the years after the Empire’s fall, when the galaxy was rediscovering what it meant to be free and Force-sensitives were reaching out, tentative, making themselves known again. Rumours had run wild. Though it had hurt to think about, he’d understood why some people were so afraid. Here were strange beings with powers greater than comprehension, who could mesmerise you into doing whatever they wanted; who could make you believe what they liked; who could kill you without a touch, if they wanted to.

Leia had held him close to the steady, constant beat of her heart, and she’d whispered that he would  _never_ be like that, murmuring that her boy was sweet and gentle and good. After Eufornis Major, she’d shipped him off to Nysa for Skywalker to deal with instead.

A sigh grated out of his vocoder, stuttering through the layers of machinery like static. Kylo released his hold on Ursus and lowered him to the ground as slowly as he could, then took more care than usual as he wiped his mind of the last five minutes. He washed away every inkling of himself—the looming mask, the deep, distorted voice, and the heavy, thunderclap footfalls—until there was a skip-gap, a blank screen of nothingness dropping down after he’d demanded that Ursus come with him. To fill it, Kylo suggested new memories, ones where he’d pulled him aside to ask about insignificant nonsense and not Leia Organa: training schedules, supplies, and all the drivel that the First Order’s upper echelon thrived on.

Ursus’s face slackened and his spine stiffened. He blinked up at Kylo as if anxious without knowing why, then stole a not-so-secret glance at the door, eager to be dismissed.

Kylo was all too happy to oblige him, tasting the sharp iron of blood on the inside of his cheek where he must have bitten it. Sweat prickled on his forehead. “Return to your post, Major,” he said, giving an offhand gesture in the direction of the door.

Once back in his quarters, Kylo unlatched his helmet, gasped for air, and began to pace. He couldn’t kill Organa himself; when he dared to imagine it, his innards lurched and a ceiling light hissed above him, flickering and fizzling as though about to shower sparks. He couldn’t do nothing and allow the assassination to go ahead as planned—that would make him a real monster, worse than Rey could ever have guessed, if he could have saved his mother but chose to turn his back on her.

He knew one thing with all the certainty left in him: he couldn’t kill for somebody who’d lied to him for so long.

 _He’s_ using  _you, is what he’s doing—_

_You don’t get it, do you? If I kill you, Snoke will have won—_

_You’re right. Being trapped and unable to leave is no life at all—_

_Because, Ben, there’s always a choice. Always—_

_That_ presence made him grind his pacing to an abrupt halt as it suffused the room with star-stuff and fireflies’ light-trails; the smell of old, worn nerf-leather and the swooping thrill of breaking atmo. Kylo let slip a small, frustrated groan, because  _of course_ Anakin Skywalker would pick now as the perfect time to send Han Solo to him.

“Kriff, even  _I_ can tell he’s manipulating you, and I’ve been dead for six months.”

Kylo rounded on Han Solo’s ghost, still limned a soft, sheer blue. He was about to scream at him to shut up, but found that he couldn’t; his mouth wouldn’t shape the words. Shaking his head wildly, he threw up his hands, a fraying thread away from hurling a datapad into the mirror and hoping that both smashed.

Worry drew a wrinkle between Han’s brows, nothing like those of age that had lined his face on Starkiller Base. “What are you going to do, kid?” When Kylo stood in stony silence and didn’t reply, he went on, an unfamiliar crack in his voice, “You know I can’t—I can’t intervene in this world, right? I can’t stop you if you’re going to do something you’ll regret.” He made as if to take a step forwards, as though trying to force Kylo to look him in the eye. “No matter what, she’s your mom—”

“I  _know_ she’s my damn mother,” Kylo snapped. “I’d never be able to forget even if I wanted to. Believe me, I’ve spent  _years_ wishing that I could.”

“What’s it going to be, then?” Han challenged, hiding his falter, trying and failing to conceal the wound-up tension in his shoulders that spoke volumes: would he soon be meeting his wife again, as ethereal and as dead as him?  _Please no,_ he seemed to say as he added, “I know you’re far, far better than just leaving her to die. You proved that one yourself, y’know.”

 _I let_ you  _die,_ Kylo almost snarled back.  _I killed you, don’t you remember? Now you’ll never hold her again. You’ll never get to argue with her and then make up a few days later as if nothing ever happened. All you can do is hope that Anakin Skywalker lets you see her, and hope is useless._

“And look what happened afterwards,” Kylo muttered, but it was getting more and more difficult to be bitter.

 _(He could feel everyone like a kaleidoscopic blur of sensations and emotions as they walked down the narrow, crowded streets of Eufornis Major, but the man skulking a careful distance behind them meant trouble, he was sure of it. The man’s thoughts were quicksilver, a deafening cacophony that drilled into Ben’s temples and gave him a headache. There was something about a First Order, whatever that was, and then pure hatred that scared Ben sick with its viciousness:_ Republic scum, Vader’s daughter, bad blood, tainted, put her down.

_The man moved for the blaster at his belt and pointed it at the back of Leia’s skull. His finger twitched on the trigger—_

_—and Ben_ screamed.  _He might have flung his hands out, but he couldn’t remember right, as though all around him had paused and he was the only moving thing left in the entire universe. All he knew was that the man had been there behind them one moment and then slamming against a wall with a nauseating_ thump  _and more blood than he’d ever seen the next. He landed in a crumpled heap, limbs at angles, the shallow rise and fall of his chest just about visible if Ben squinted._

_Leia whipped around, and the stillness around them shattered to pieces, and Ben stared at what he’d done and screamed and screamed and screamed.)_

“I know what you think, and it’s wrong, okay?” Han started. “We didn’t send you away because we were afraid of you, or because we wanted to be rid of you. We did it because we thought Luke could  _help_ you.” He let it out in a rush, like the words had been building up ever since Ben had gone to Nysa, as if he’d lose his nerve if he slowed down for half a heartbeat. “You were terrified, kid.  _Haunted,_ even. After we—well, it was mostly your mom—figured out what happened and spoke to the guards who ran over, you wouldn’t speak for two days. Not a peep. You weren’t interested in food, and you wouldn’t sleep. You just had this hollow look on your face, and we couldn’t—we couldn’t stand it.”

 _You could have tried to visit me more than once,_ Kylo almost argued, but something deep within him—a rip, with Snoke’s claw marks tearing it open wider—knit together until whole like an amaranthine from his dream, painful and world-upending, taking his heart and clamping a fist around it. Instead of  _you could have made an effort and visited me on my birthdays, rather than sending packages and pretending they were enough,_ he said through gritted teeth, “Will you please be quiet? I need to concentrate.”

A bright smile lit up Han’s features, and in his relief, his form shone with a light that crept to the shadows lurking at the edges of the room and chased them away. What Han didn’t and couldn’t understand was that what Kylo was about to do was inevitable. From the very instant Snoke had decided that Kylo would kill Leia Organa, some part of Kylo had already decided that he would save her.

Closing his eyes and reaching for his bond with Rey, Kylo focused on the interweaving gold and silver threads that spiralled between them, connecting them from light-years apart. He’d once caught himself wondering whether the colours meant anything, and whether other Force-sensitives saw them or their own, but he’d realised that the fierce, proud gold—the sand dunes, sun glare, and the honey-hued flowers; the heady power that had become  _his_ for a moment during his duel with Enyo Ren—belonged to her. He didn’t know if his plan would work, or if it was possible, but he  _needed_ it to be.

Kylo Ren did not plead. This time, he made an exception.

When his eyes flew open again, he was in her quarters, and they were strange. No, he corrected himself, they were  _beautiful,_ and so different from how sterile and regulated everything was aboard the  _Finalizer._ Here, the space she occupied seemed to live and breathe with her.

Her windowsill overflowed with flowers of all kinds: thistle-like sprigs in pinks, royal purples, and dusky violets; delicate white blossoms with soft, cloven petals; stalks nodding to the side, bearing trumpet-shaped blue flowers; and a cutting from a tree, glowing a pale fluorescent orange. All were kept in glasses of water with a layer of coloured glass pebbles lining their bottoms, casting rainbows of light across her unmade bed. Her shelves were stocked with yet  _more_ plants, these with weeping leaves, potted with dark, healthy soil. She’d gathered pinecones and chestnuts from the forest floor and displayed them pride of place in between each plant pot, as though they were precious stones. It was all so real, he could forget that he wasn’t actually there.

Rey herself sat cross-legged on the carpet, oblivious, tinkering with tiny mechanical scraps arranged in a row in front of her. Her hair was loose and fanned out over her hunched shoulders, and a small furrow lay between her eyebrows as she toyed with a miniature screwdriver no larger than her thumb.

Something changed in the air and made her glance up. At the sight of him, projected across the stars, she let out a startled shout and dropped the screwdriver to the floor.

 

* * *

 

 _“Wait,_ will you? I’m not here to fight you,” Kylo Ren said as Rey’s hand shot for the lightsaber at her hip, about to switch it on to defend herself if need be. His voice was like a sigh, low and worn, and he looked more tired than usual, if that was possible. Bruise-like shadows ringed his fever-bright eyes. “In fact, even if I did want to fight you, I’d be hindered by the one thing you appear to be overlooking—” he gestured to himself with gloved hands, “—which is that I’m not here to begin with.”

Keeping her hand tensed uncomfortably tight around the hilt of her lightsaber, Rey ordered her uneven breathing to steady itself and allowed herself a proper look at the intruder. At once, she saw what he meant, and eased out a juddery, relieved exhale.

Kylo Ren wasn’t corporeal like a real, flesh-and-blood person ought to be, but nor was he blue-tinted and flickering like a hologram. He was unlike anything she’d ever seen before, illuminated from within and glowing faintly like a moon’s belly. Though she’d never met them and had only felt the vaguest impressions of them—gowns sewn from sunsets, grass after rain, and unfurling water flowers; a scar and a crooked, cocky grin; flashes of auburn hair and cloaks sweeping over dunes; gentle smiles and sand-roughened palms—he reminded her of Luke’s ghosts, those he still whispered to in private, when he knew that nobody would be around to listen.

Yet Ren hadn’t died, had he? She’d spoken with him in their meadow-dream mere hours ago, and some part of her—an anxious, pessimistic part that she almost wanted to lock away and ignore—suspected that she’d have felt it if he had. Or worse: during their training session earlier that morning, when she’d mustered up the courage to ask him whether one’s death could kill the other, Luke had gone quiet and sad, as if frustrated by what he didn’t know and his own inability to give her a reassuring answer.

To her, his silence had felt like an omen, or that old Jakkuvian superstition she’d once laughed at: a thing spoken aloud was a thing made true.

“You’re welcome to try to strike me, though your lightsaber would go through me and make a mess of your bedroom instead.” Ren was still watching her, his expression unchanging, not even when she aimed a half-hearted wary glance at him and reluctantly lifted her hand away from her belt. He was  _almost_ unreadable, as though he’d swapped one mask for another, this one hastily forged and on the verge of cracking at any moment, if the unnatural stiffness he held himself with was anything to go by. “I’m projecting myself to your location through our bond. I didn’t think it could be done, but—” he began, and that was all she heard.

Rey froze, a chill shivering down her spine. “You know where I am,” she interrupted, barely louder than a breath.

“Yes. Alinor, isn’t it?”

Before she knew what she was doing, she was on her feet with her fists balled at her sides. “How long have you known?” she gritted out, with such raw ferocity woven into her words, it seemed to throw him off-guard. When his mouth opened and shut with no answer, she surged forwards, coming close enough to jab a finger at his chest or to count the moles dotting his cheeks, and demanded again,  _“How long?”_

Ren’s broad shoulders rose and drooped with a sigh. He didn’t take a step backwards, though she’d doubted that he would—right now, she could do no harm to him, a still-living ghost stood next to her bed. “Since you arrived there. Close to six standard months ago.” He spread out his palms, a peace offering from a man who wouldn’t know peace if it smacked him in the face. “It’s… not intentional. I just felt,  _saw_ things—” Cutting himself off in the middle of a sentence, he scowled, gave up on explaining himself, and said, “If you try, you can see where I am, too.”

He'd managed to pique her curiosity, though she’d never put aside her pride enough to admit it. Giving him a cursory look, she decided that he wasn’t an immediate threat, and let her eyes flutter shut to see beyond reality into the Force, the way Luke had taught her that moon-bathed night on Ahch-To.

At first, Rey didn’t know what she was supposed to be searching for. The Force was alive with so many wispy, myriad-coloured threads, swaying to the rhythm of thousands of heartbeats—a trembling thrum she recognised as belonging to the tiniest of birds, skitter-quick patters for the forest creatures in the tree boughs, and slower, calmer thuds for those milling about the base.

When she found it at last, she struggled to coax her gaze away. Looped around her littlest finger was a luminous length of string, shifting from a dark storm-grey to a shining silver and leading back to the same finger on Kylo Ren’s hand, where it bloomed into a dazzling gold— _her_ gold, she knew. Imagining it growing taut, she tugged it, and—

—saw a laughterless place with cold durasteel walls; felt the sear of artificial lights singeing her skin; heard the background hum of recirculating air; and chafed against a refined male voice, which sounded as though it belonged to the personification of slime. In front of her was an endless field of stars, all burning and twinkling with nobody who cared enough to name them, or to sit by them and trace fingers over them to join them into make-believe constellations. If  _she’d_ been there, she’d have made archers, ships, wild animals chasing their tails, cubs scampering after their mothers, and birds spreading their massive, nebula-feathered wings. Soft as a whisper, the word  _Finalizer_ came to her mind, and she let it in.

“A lifeless place,” Rey murmured to herself in disgust, thinking of ramrod-straight backs and the uniform clicking of boot-heels. “It’s ugly. There’s thousands on board, and they’re all moving, but none are  _living.” Not even you,_ she thought.

Knowing that Ren was aboard a battlecruiser called the  _Finalizer_ didn’t feel like it mattered much. It was scarcely a secret when compared with the location of the Resistance base, which was kept strictly classified: Poe had once told her that not one person going off-planet on a supply run was allowed to say  _where_ the goods were being taken, in case information fell into the wrong hands, as it often did. Kylo Ren had known where the Resistance was for months, but he’d made no move to tell anyone in the First Order about it, not even Snoke—after all, they were still alive. It would have been so easy, so  _effortless,_ for Ren to mention a small green planet in the Outer Rim named Alinor, then have airstrikes sent to rend the base to rubble without them ever realising what had hit them.

But he  _hadn’t,_ and that was what confused her.

Scavengers, as a rule, weren’t loyal. Rey had learned the hard way that most of her fellow dune-dwellers thought there was nothing to be gained from trusting another except for a knife in the back sooner or later. Despite Jakku’s tough lessons, she was determined to be loyal to her friends, to Luke, and to Leia, and that meant wanting the Resistance to be as safe as it could be, even if she’d never signed up to fight a war.

“All right, what do you want, Ren?” she asked as she resurfaced, cringing away from the too-high pitch of her voice. “What in R’iia’s name is so important that you have to just…  _appear_ in my room and make it obvious that you could come down here and kill us at any time?”

“A secret for a secret,” Ren replied, without missing a beat. “My mo—General Organa. She’s going to Corellia today, isn’t she?”

Rey’s feet carried her several steps back of their own accord.  _He wants to hurt Leia,_ she thought in shock, a stunned silence enveloping her like a shroud and making words stick uselessly at the back of her throat. He’d  _tricked_ her; he’d told her that he knew about Alinor to threaten her, and like a bloggin waddling right into a hungry scavenger’s grip, she’d plunged headfirst into the trap. In their meadow-dream, he’d made her feel as though there could be an actual person hiding somewhere underneath Kylo Ren’s helmet, and now he was going to kill his mother the same way he’d killed his father.

Fixing him with a freezing glare, she tilted up her chin and said, as firm as she could, “I’m  _not_ telling  _you_  that.”

Ren pressed his lips into a flat line and turned his face to the side, where his mask of nonchalance quavered and broke. His mouth twisted awkwardly at the corner that Rey could see, as if he were swallowing his pride and trying not to choke on it. “Please,” he whispered hoarsely, his Adam’s apple bobbing, “I have to know.”

Just before Rey could set her jaw and demand that he explain why, a sea of silver-edged memories flooded into her mind unbidden, forcing her to fight to keep herself afloat. She knew within moments that they were Ren’s and not her own: even though he was a good head taller than she was, they were claustrophobic, boxing her into a space too tight for her to stretch out her arms or do anything more than hunch over, her elbows drawn in close to her body.

In them, she—no, Kylo Ren; she was  _him,_ somehow—stood in a darkened room lit up by a frail shaft of light that trickled in from somewhere above her. She craned her neck to lock eyes with a gigantic hologram of a scarred creature, its forehead half-sunken with a crater of an old wound and its skin as pale as sun-bleached bone. Her stomach flipped as the figure who had to be Snoke leaned forwards on twig-thin arms, telling her about a plot against Leia’s life, and how she would have to kill Leia herself if the time-bomb failed.

Around her, time skipped in a dizzying blur, and before she could reorient herself, she was using the Force to hold aloft a stocky man with a face like a blank slate, swooping into his head and prying out every last detail. Corellia, a Senate Building, and a detonation set for the thick of the meeting, calculated to leave no survivors. A heart—either hers or Ren’s, or perhaps both in unison; Rey couldn’t be sure—thundered a violent beat as she wiped the man’s mind and erased all traces of herself looming over him.

The flow of memories dried up as suddenly as they’d come rushing in and left her staring at Ren, fumbling for something, anything to say. Nothing came.

While Rey sought her missing words, dithering midway between an awed  _you’re saving her aren’t you_  and a resentful  _but you couldn’t give that same mercy to your father could you,_ Kylo Ren spoke first. “You  _have_ to tell her not to go,” he said. There was no fire in his voice, as if all the anger had been sapped out of him. “I can’t. It’s only you I can appear to like this.”

They didn’t have much time if she was to catch Leia before she left for Corellia. Leia’s personal ship, the  _Mirrorbright,_ would be waiting for her in the Resistance’s hangar, and she’d be packing her bags at that very instant.

Blurting out a quick  _thank you_ that, strangely, didn’t make her feel sick to voice aloud, Rey hurried towards the door. As she was about to slam her palm against the button that would open it, realisation flared in her like a struck match: what would Ren do now that he’d deliberately disobeyed a direct order from his master? A master like Snoke—cruel enough to seep poison into the thoughts of a boy too young to walk or talk; ruthless enough to pick that boy apart at the seams and mould him into a monster—would be the furthest thing possible from forgiving, she knew, which meant that Ren had to, too. “Snoke won’t be pleased with you for this,” she told him.

For a second or two, what she’d said hung inevitable and lead-heavy in the air between them, until Ren shook his head and urged, “It doesn’t matter. Just  _go.”_

With one foot already out the door, Rey paused and whirled around to face him. He was slowly fading, growing more and more transparent, as though she could flap her hands and waft him away like a stubborn cloud of smoke. Dreamy, goldening rays of afternoon sunlight hit the coloured pebbles lining the glasses of picked flowers on her windowsill, spilling hazy rainbows through him. “Wait,” she said, “she’ll ask who told me. I can lie and say that I had a vision, or…” She let herself trail off.

Kylo Ren studied her, then made a slight twitch of his head that might have been a nod. In a voice so quiet and so soft, she almost didn’t hear him speak at all, he said, “You can mention that the information came from her son, if you want to.”

The moment he vanished, she took off, shutting the door with a gust of the Force and jogging down the maze-like, chrome-clean corridors of the base. Something significant had just occurred, disguised as nothing more than a hushed, simple sentence, but she could mull it over by inchmeal later. When Leia was safe—when she’d abandoned her trip to Corellia and, Rey had to cross her fingers and hope, convinced every other senator not to attend—she could think about how Kylo Ren had called himself Leia Organa’s son when he’d once so fervently denied her and his name. How he’d tripped and stumbled over the word  _mother_ as though every fibre of him had longed to say it.

 _Luke,_ she shouted, seeking him out in the Force,  _meet me outside Leia’s office as soon as you can. It’s urgent._

Her master, who still refused to be addressed as such, responded straight away.  _I’m coming,_ he replied, then the calm cornflower blue lake of his Force signature rippled in concern.  _Is everything all right?_ he asked.

Rey swerved around a group of loitering civilians.  _It will be once we get to Leia._

Luke didn’t try to question her further, and perhaps that was one of the many reasons why she liked him so much. Somehow, he was there waiting for her before she rounded the last corner, her breath desert-dry and sharp in her chest and coming in short, hot puffs. As he saw the look that must have been on her face, his mouth tightened, and his cybernetic fingers began nervously picking at a stray thread on the fraying sleeve of his robe. When a droid beeped and beckoned them both inside, Rey entered Leia Organa’s office for the first time.

Her luggage was piled on a countertop, and Rey let herself scan the room. Leia, it turned out, kept odd trinkets like Rey kept her flowers, her chestnuts and pinecones, and her plants in their pots.

A carved wooden chest stood proud on Leia’s desk, sealed with a burnished brass lock and adorned with intricate designs that must have taken weeks of painstaking, loving work, if not  _months,_  to etch in. On a shelf was a peculiar glass animal the size of her palm, complete with little black beads for eyes. It seemed as though it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a lizard or an overgrown goat—a tauntaun, Rey remembered, from her treasured encyclopaedia of the galaxy’s flora and fauna. Next to the tauntaun sat a vase, bursting with two vibrant flowers, one made up of cheerful orange clusters that gave off the faintest, most delicious smell of ginger, the other long-stemmed, delicately scented, and topped with large red blooms with layers upon layers of frilled petals.

She saw the nerf-leather jacket last of all. It had slung itself over a coat-hook as if awaiting its owner’s return, expecting them to saunter in whenever they liked and shrug it about their shoulders.

Leia blinked in surprise at the sight of them, then the stress tensing her features dissolved and she gave an easy smile. They’d interrupted her as she’d been styling her greying hair into a crown braid, loose wisps feathering about her cheeks. “Rey, Luke,” she said warmly, making as though to walk towards them before stopping in her tracks and frowning. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost, Rey. What’s going on?”

Luke shot Rey a pointed glance, as if to ask the same thing.

Rey explained about the time-bomb in the Senate Building as fast as she could, not yet daring to mention Kylo Ren. “You can’t go, General,” she finished in a breathless rush.

A thick silence fell and seemed to drag on forever, with neither Luke nor Leia knowing how to break it and Rey unwilling to try so soon, giving them a chance to process it. Finally, Leia muttered, “A time-bomb.” A wry quirk tilted up half her mouth, like she was more disappointed with the  _way_  they’d chosen to kill her, rather than the fact that there  _was_ an assassination plot. “The First Order doesn’t pick its leaders for their originality, does it?” Luke moved towards her, an unconscious, protective gesture, but she batted him away with one hand and scoffed, “Oh, don’t look so alarmed. I’ve not had any decent threats against my life for so long, I’d started to worry they’d given up.” She turned to Rey and asked with a gentler tone, “How do you know? Did you have a vision? Luke told me—some Force-sensitives are more prone to them than others—”

“Visions can be misleading,” Luke began, “and sometimes, what they show you might not ever happen, or might not be meant to be taken at face value—”

“It wasn’t a vision,” Rey interrupted. She swallowed past a sudden lump in her throat and met Leia’s eyes—her son’s eyes, she noticed for the first time, with a pang to a place tucked somewhere behind her ribs. “Kylo Ren told me,” she said softly, that Jakkuvian superstition borne on the creaky words of wizened elders flitting into her thoughts again and setting it in stone.

She showed them her rapid-fire memories before either of them could react: Kylo Ren appearing in her quarters from entire stellar systems away, telling her that he and he alone had known where they were for months, keeping it from Snoke and anyone else who would have destroyed them; the desperation in his voice; what he’d put into her mind and made her see; and how he’d said  _her son_ and not any other name.

“He didn’t want it to happen,” she recalled, quieter now, watching their faces. Leia’s had gone blank and paper-white, the kind of expressionlessness that could only come from vast amounts of practice, though her fists had clenched hard enough to hurt. Luke, still stood next to his sister, wore a dozen feelings all at once, none of them decipherable. “I don’t—I don’t think he was lying,” she continued, for what it was worth. “The bond, you know? Everything he was saying—the way he was acting—felt so real.”

“Ben always was a terrible liar,” Leia said, with a shaking shadow of a smile. She let herself float adrift in memories for a moment—Rey wondered what she was seeing; if they were happy or more bittersweet—then wrenched herself from them, steeled her petite shoulders, and grabbed for her datapad. Her hands were wracked with tremors; it was a small miracle that she could type. “I’m going to message the other senators and let them know,” she informed them, tapping at the screen with more force than necessary. “The senators for Arkanis and Comra can’t make it, nine hells know why, so I’ll skip them.” Lowering her voice, as if afraid that saying it too loudly would end the spell, like some polar opposite of Jakku’s folk beliefs, she added, “I won’t say who told me.”

Luke sank down into a chair, gripping at its armrests like a pair of anchors. “He intervened to save you, and by extension, many others, of his own free will,” he murmured, musing to himself. “I  _knew_ he wasn’t lost to us; I always—” He jerked his head up. “Ben won’t be able to keep this a secret,” he blurted out. “I know Ben, and I know that he was  _always_ skilled with mental Force abilities, better than my eldest students even without training, but Snoke will realise that  _somebody_ interfered when an entire senate’s worth of politicians all mysteriously manage to evade a bombing, and if he found out…”

There wouldn’t  _be_ a Kylo Ren, Rey thought, and if anything remained after everything that Snoke would no doubt do to him, there would be nothing left of Ben in him, whoever Ben had been. Nothing of her blocked-off memories of Luke’s Praxeum, which only he could give back. Nothing of the child Han Solo had loved so much, he’d died for him, knowingly or not.

“He’s… he’s still hiding that he took me from Nysa,” she chimed in after a brief hesitation, “and Snoke hasn’t found out about our bond yet, either.”  _I wouldn’t be here if he had,_ she didn’t say, because it felt like a dangerous thing to admit. The way Luke’s eyes flicked over to her told her that he’d had the same thought; he’d imagined Snoke seizing her from under their noses like she had.  _He would try to take me from here, and he’d threaten you—he’d threaten everything—to make me go with him. And I_ would,  _if it meant that he wouldn’t hurt any of you._

“You’re right, and if I’m honest, it’s nothing short of incredible,” Luke replied, with a heavy, windy gust of an exhale that could have carried the weight of the galaxy on its back. “I suppose we’ll have to make sure that he’s telling the truth, won’t we?”

Rey screwed up her nose. “What would he gain from lying about it?”

With a slight shrug, he answered, “It’s far-fetched, but if Snoke wanted you, having his apprentice gain your trust would be one way to go about getting you on his side: say Ben warns you about a possible bomb threat, you deliver the message to Leia, Leia agrees not to go, and if nothing happens, if there  _was_ no bomb, he can pretend that it didn’t detonate or something.” Giving her a watery little smile, he said, “I know I sound too wary, considering how much I… More than anything, I want to believe him, I do, but we have to be  _certain.”_

“So… why don’t we have droids sweep the building?” she asked. “If anything’s there, they’ll find it in no time, won’t they?”

Luke shook his head. “That’d attract too much publicity—imagine the HoloNet latching on to a story like that, and if Ben’s info is genuine, he’ll be in grave danger for alerting us.” He rested his cybernetic knuckles on his chin, his thumb rubbing an absent-minded pattern on his beard, the wires that peeked out from between the ridged joints tautening and slackening with each movement. “Hear me out,” he started, glancing at Leia and Rey in turn, “but we could ensure that the building is empty on the day, while keeping quiet about the exact nature of the threat. That way, if there  _is_ an explosion, we know, and Ben stays safe for now.” He didn’t mention the all-too-precarious  _afterwards,_ as if he didn’t dare.

“The Senate Building in Coronet City has stood for over six hundred years, and you want to blow it up?” Leia interjected in indignation, then deflated. “No, no, I agree; it’s just bricks and mortar. A building can be rebuilt, but my son can’t.” She braced her elbows on her desk and clasped her fingers together. “I’d give everything I own to have Ben back,” she near-whispered. “I’ve often thought to myself that if someone somehow offered, if it meant having him come home, I’d—I’d go back and stand there on the Death Star, and I’d watch Alderaan—”

Her back canted forwards, reminding Rey of the weeping flowers that, weeks ago, she’d tenderly picked from the forest floor and placed in the glasses on her windowsill. Finn’s encyclopaedia had called them  _bluebells;_ they had been exceptionally late to bloom, unfurling their tiny buds as Alinor’s summer waned, and she’d meant to keep them until they withered and died—but, like all her plants, she’d found that they’d insisted on staying alive, with the same determined resilience that had given her endless hope on Jakku.

“Leia,” Luke murmured, his eyes pained. Hauling himself out of his chair and over to her, he laid his flesh-and-blood palm on her arm, and this time, she didn’t chide him or fend him off.

Instead, she went on as if speaking to herself, her voice hoarse, “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? The last time I saw my own son, it was by holocall, of all things. He was a gangly fourteen-year-old with Han’s nose and too much hair, and he couldn’t bring himself to say a simple ‘hello’ to his father without scowling up a storm.” She looked down at where Luke’s hand lay, her gaze intent enough to burn a hole through it, as if it was taking every bit of her strength not to tear up. “Now, he’s twenty-nine, and I don’t even know what he  _looks_ like anymore—but he’s still mine.”

Luke didn’t let go. “And Vader was still our father.”

Raising her other hand, Leia rubbed at her temple with the pads of her fingers, as though she had a headache. “You always were the more hopeful one,” she said to him, almost smiling. “You thought there was still good in our—in Vader. For the longest time, I never understood, not until Ben.”

Deep in her own thoughts, Rey almost missed Luke saying, breeze-soft and strangely sad, “All I’ve got is hope,” and Leia shifting, retrieving her datapad. She felt like an eavesdropper listening in on two different kinds of loss, each no less sharp.

Luke had told her enough about Leia’s past, enough for her own chest to hurt in tandem. Leia had grown up  _loved,_ most of all, and she’d lived on a planet teeming with green things, peppered with mountains that pierced the clouds, and jewelled with crystalline palaces casting rainbows on polished stone ground. He’d told her about how artists had painted with the flowers and the wind, and how one man, one brave, stupid man, had created an unflattering portrait of Emperor Palpatine with black lilies spread like rot over his face. Everything—the glittering palaces, the mountains, and the paintings and poetry and spiced wines—had been forever lost in the blink of an eye, and there was nothing that Leia could do to bring it back.

Rey had lost her home, too, but she didn’t know if she’d misplaced it, or if it was as gone as Alderaan.

“I’ve sent a message to everybody who’ll be there,” Leia said. She put down the datapad, and then shook her head and let out a little laugh. “Just as the New Republic had  _stopped_ thinking I’m insane, I go and give them a reason to start again.”

“And now we wait,” Luke said, with a weary sigh.

 

* * *

 

If she looked in the mirror, Rey thought to herself with a huff, she’d have dark circles under her eyes to rival Kylo Ren’s.

For the past five days, she’d fought to sleep, screwing up her haze-rimmed eyes when dawn set the sky aflame with a smouldering lilac glow and rudely threw sheets of too-bright light across her face through the window. For five days entirely too long, she’d been alternating between stealing handfuls of hours in a doze here and there, and twisting about under her layers of blankets, trying to get comfortable with a racing mind that dug in its heels and refused to rest.

Rey was no stranger to sleepless nights like those. Sometimes, on Jakku, as a makeshift cure, she’d crept outside by moonlight, propped herself up in the sand against her toppled AT-AT,  _Hellhound Two,_ and gazed up at the canopy of stars blazing above her, counting them and inventing names for each one until she became too drowsy to carry on. That had been when she’d watched, eagle-eyed, scanning for the smoke-trails of ships about to land, bold enough to believe that someone out there was searching for a girl who wore three buns in her hair. Other nights, she’d stayed curled up in her hammock, picturing her ocean in meticulous detail. There, she’d conjured up the frothing foam, the waves lapping hungrily at the make-believe shore, and even the seabirds, all tamer than any steelpecker and more intelligent than any bloggin.

Now, not even her ocean could help drift her into dreams—at least, not until she relented and let herself imagine her delicate silver blossoms and her chiming bells, the ones that made her heart quiver with a sore, sweet ache. When she did, she’d awaken with the impossible scent of sea-salt ebbing away around her, vanishing before she could catch it and hold it close.

Blaming Kylo Ren for her lack of sleep over the past standard week would have been easier and  _far_ more satisfying. After all, his whirlwind emotions kept blustering into her head without any warning whatsoever, sucked dry of colour by the  _Finalizer’_ s dull, overcast shades of monochrome. It was, however, almost all down to her, which was somehow more infuriating of a thought than it would have been had it been Ren’s fault.

She’d preferred it when things had been much less complicated, if that had ever been the case. When there had been clearly defined boundaries between them, without him turning her desert-dreams to meadows from years ago, and  _certainly_  without him appearing unannounced in her quarters. When she could have called him her enemy without having to think twice, or without needing to scold herself— _he murdered Han Solo, broke Leia’s heart, destroyed everything Luke had been working towards, took the Force from people who didn’t know how to live a life without it, and spirited you away to some junkyard in the middle of dusty nowhere, so why the kriff should you care? Why should it matter to you what Snoke does with him?_

 _We have a Force bond, whether we like it or not_ was not a satisfactory answer, she’d discovered, even if she pretended otherwise.

On the day of the would-be Senate meeting, the world around her did its best to go on as normal. Rey trained with Luke in the morning, though their minds had been elsewhere, and she’d known from the faraway, nostalgic sheen in his eyes that his thoughts were filled to the brim with his nephew. She’d almost given in to her curiosity and asked him what Ben had been like as a boy; if he’d been a bookish, clever little thing or a muddy-kneed prankster with a mischievous grin, but she hadn’t dared. The question had died on her tongue, and she’d decided that she’d have to learn for herself if—no,  _when—_ Kylo Ren gave her memories back.

Instead of finishing their last round of sparring, she and Luke had powered off their training lightsabers and meditated, sitting lotus-like in the forest clearing. While she’d concentrated on reaching for that quiet place deep within her, pale fluorescent petals from the nearby gorsa trees had floated down like miniature falling stars. They’d glowed as soft as candlelight behind her closed eyelids, gliding into her lap and her loose tangle of hair, and somehow, they’d reminded her so much of her  _other_ silky blossoms, she’d had to swallow hard against an unexpected thickness in her throat.

When Luke had fidgeted and drummed his fingers against his kneecaps, she’d averted her eyes, and when she’d tripped on a stray thread of thought and dipped out of her quiet place, he’d not said a word.

Later, tired to the very marrow of her bones, she met up with Finn to walk to the cafeteria for lunch. He waited for her by the main back doors that led to the fields and then to the forest, chugging from a large canteen of water as eagerly as though his life depended on it. His cheeks shone with a fine sheen of sweat: while she’d been training with Luke, he’d been training his group of young recruits for the Resistance. It was the job they’d set aside for him after he’d completed his physiotherapy, after they’d repaired his slashed-up spine.

All of his recruits were aged between sixteen and eighteen, some of them coming half a head taller than him even so, and some of them broader than many full-grown adults Rey knew. Each of them—from the strongest to the scrawniest—looked at him with awe, like a hero from the stories their parents would have spun for them when they were small.

From what Finn had told her, people had been suspicious of him at first. Some had balked at the notion of an ex-stormtrooper wandering the base, and there had been whispered talk of spies and hushed mutterings of,  _well, what else are we supposed to do with him? Kick him out and leave him on his own?_ As he’d recovered, they’d changed their tunes. They’d declared him extraordinary for how he’d defied his conditioning and his orders, brave for how he’d risked death for what was right, and some, like the higher-ups, had pronounced him a living, breathing symbol of hope. To his utter bewilderment, he’d become a sign that the First Order  _could_ be defeated.

If mistrust had followed her in the beginning, people had been gracious enough to be silent about it. And, she thought grimly, it  _had_ to have—while they’d all heard the legends of brilliant, golden-haired Luke, they’d also heard the tales of Vader and how he could throttle a man without a word, or of the Emperor and the lightning that sparked from his fingertips.

“So, one of the recruits  _almost_ landed a pretty good punch in the gut today,” Finn was saying as they walked, gesturing to his middle, “before they remembered that the whole point of the exercise was ‘no physical contact’ and not ‘cause internal bleeding’.”

“You’ll have to watch out for that one, then,” Rey joked. As soon as the words had left her mouth, she winced: they’d come out too strained, sounding tight with stress and roughened at the edges. She shot him a quick smile, hoping that he wouldn’t pick up on it.

Like always, he did.

Stopping mid-stride, he laid a warm hand on her shoulder. “Is it him again?” he asked, lowering his voice so as not to be overheard. When she nodded, he pulled them into an alcove, the same pristine chrome and white as the rest of the base, and muttered, “I don’t get it, Rey.” He shook his head and furrowed his eyebrows as if trying to puzzle it out then and there, before continuing, “Ren’s known where we are for  _months,_ and plus, he might have known where you were before you got here. By now, he could have had us killed a thousand different ways— _should_ have, really; I mean, it’d save him a lot of trouble.”

He’d brought it up to her every day since she’d cracked and explained everything from the last week,  _needing_ to talk to somebody who wasn’t Luke, urging Finn to keep it to himself. Each time he’d mentioned it, he’d seemed more and more confused. At one point during breakfast, he’d crossed his arms, scowled down at his cup of caf, and said,  _the day that anything Kylo Ren says can be trusted, it’ll be a cold, cold day on Mustafar._

“It doesn’t make much sense to me either,” Rey replied, shrugging.

For a moment, it was the truth, until she realised that the answer was there in front of her. Perhaps it had been all along, but it was too obvious to her now, making her wonder how she  _hadn’t_  seen it.

Ren had hidden Alinor from Snoke because he was protecting Leia the one way he could, though Rey couldn’t possibly fathom why a mother was worth it and not a father. She had no memory of ever having her own, and had only the dimmest, rosiest of ideas of what it was meant to be like, gathered from sneaking wistful glances at civilian families while off-planet, all the while trying not to stare at gap-toothed children beaming up at fond parents and hurtling through the streets as they played with  _siblings._

 _Actual brothers and sisters,_ she’d thought in amazed jealousy, drinking in features that looked almost alike, linked hands, and matching glares, aimed at the other.

“I’m no strategist, but if I were the kind of person who rose through the ranks of the First Order, I’d have told on us for sure.” Finn shifted his weight; he’d never be able to forget that in another life, that could have been him. He could have stayed and been their weapon, and she could have surrendered herself to the Dark Side—to Snoke—when it had slinked into her ears on Starkiller Base. “As in, I’d have mobilised all ground and air forces against us immediately,” he added. “That’d be the logical thing to do, anyway.”

Rey smiled in spite of herself. “That sounds like a decent strategy to me. Maybe that’s why the Resistance wanted you for the job.”

“Maybe,” Finn allowed, almost letting himself echo her smile. He frowned, teeth worrying his bottom lip, and said slowly, “I don’t want to think about that info getting out to those people. Worst case scenario, we have to move planets again, and I don’t want to think about what I’d do—what I’d  _have_  to do, to protect myself and you and everybody else—if they found us.”

“They aren’t going to find us,” Rey reassured him, confident now that she had what she thought was a better grip on Ren’s motives, her voice stronger and firmer. She could give Finn that little comfort, if nothing else: a guarantee that, providing he wasn’t lying to her—and something in her insisted that he wasn’t—Ren would fight to keep his mother’s location safe. “How about we go and get something to eat, rather than just standing here?”

A torrent of chatter buffeted against her as they approached the cafeteria. At once, a sinking feeling took hold of her: running through every syllable was a distinct undercurrent of unease, stammering in the air. She knew that if she were to stand still and listen close, pressing her cheek up against the sliding door and letting the buzz of conversation wash over her, she’d hear Leia’s name, repeated over and over from a hundred different restless mouths. Another name— _Ben Organa,_ or  _Kylo Ren,_ or perhaps  _Leia’s son—_ would be missing, though none of them would know that it was supposed to be there at all.

Inside, after crossing the threshold to the intermingling scents of cooking food, she and Finn spotted Poe, already seated at a table. Jessika Pava, reclining in her seat sandwiched between him and Snap Wexley, offered Rey a wide, earnest beam as she neared them. Rey wasted no time in returning it, but her heart leapt to her mouth as Poe glanced up and greeted them with a strained flicker of a smile. It looked odd on him; it was out of place on a face that usually sported some sort of brash, dare-me-and-I’ll-do-it grin.

“Big news,” he said to her and Finn without preamble. “Someone’s bombed the Senate Building on Corellia. The entire thing’s been reduced to rubble—completely obliterated. But someone warned General Organa beforehand and she told the others, so nobody was injured. Not a single soul.”

Poe sprang up all of a sudden, seized his tray, and made as if to take it to be cleaned. On his way, he stopped in front of Rey and leaned over to her until she could smell starship fuel and the warm spice of his aftershave. “It was him, wasn’t it? Kylo Ren?” he whispered into her ear. “The General wouldn’t tell any of us who’d told her, but she had this…  _look_  on her face after she got the news. Not quite happy or sad, but like she’d found a ray of hope after going for so long with nothing.”

Rey could only answer with a tiny nod, her knuckles blotching white as she clutched the back of a chair for dear life. Kylo Ren—the man they called  _Jedi Killer,_ the boy she must have called  _Ben_ while laughing and wrapping her skinny arms about his neck—had intervened for Leia, disregarding the price he’d surely have to pay for his disobedience.

Sucking in a breath, equal parts mystified and satisfied by her response, Poe walked away.

By her side, Finn shook his head and muttered, more to himself, “Looks like it’s a cold, cold day on Mustafar after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to the First Order's [rank insignia](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rank_insignia_of_the_First_Order), a major wears teal, with Tarkin's name sewn onto their cuff.


	4. How the Light Gets In

_Hiss—_

Kylo Ren’s muscles protested, burning as though they’d been set aflame. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped cool down the curve of his jaw, skipping and stuttering over the ever-so-faint groove that his scar had scored into his cheek.

_Slash—_

Again and again, until his heart thundered a war drum’s pounding rhythm against his ribcage and his chest heaved with every breath he took, he dodged the bolts shot his way by a line of droids armed with blasters set to  _stun._ He deflected each whizzing lightning-flash of red with his blade, flicking them instead to a mat that he’d pushed against the wall at the far end of the room. It sagged in on itself, slanting fit to topple over—he’d peppered its surface with hundreds of smoking, singed holes, each one no larger than his thumbnail.

When he grew bored of that exercise, Kylo gritted his teeth and hit the mat with a gust of the Force, shoving it to the floor, where it landed with a mighty  _thump._ Powering off the droids, he readjusted their warped antennae with a gentler hand than somebody like him ought to have been capable of, then slipped into his forms.

Carving out the well-worn stances of each form was supposed to distract him enough to quiet his mind, but it was doing an awful job. That night, he’d struggled to sleep, more so than usual: somewhere a thousand light-years away on Corellia, a time-bomb was ticking down to zero, about to explode. He’d imagined it in grim detail, almost  _hearing_ the silence before the inevitable eruption of chaos, and in amongst the billowing plumes of dust and smoke, he’d pictured Leia Organa’s face, white and terrified and accusing. Eventually, he’d given up on glaring up at the ceiling with his thoughts running in circles and he’d stolen away to an empty training room, but even now, even as he panted for air, he couldn’t stop  _thinking._

Thinking of how—as he moved with the heavy, aggressive strikes of Djem So—he had been a boy named Ben a distant once-upon-a-time ago, and that boy had favoured Niman.

Most of all, he kept thinking of his mother.

He kept catching himself feeling out for her bright presence in the Force, searching for the stubborn, half-frayed spidersilk threads that still linked them after all the years that had gone by. Every last traitorous bit of himself—because that was what he’d become—hoped that Rey’s warning had reached her, that she’d believed Rey, and that Rey had believed him when he’d managed to appear before her. If neither had—

If Leia had died, he’d have felt it.

Kylo clung to that thought as though it were a talisman, drawing it as close to him as he could. Being sensitive to the Force was a rare gift, he knew, but he would be lying to himself if he said he hadn’t felt in his bones every death he’d caused, and even those he hadn’t. When Starkiller Base had annihilated the Hosnian system, the impact had ricocheted through him like a punch to the gut, knocking the breath from his lungs. It had been as if the very tapestry of the Force had been seized and ripped apart, tearing out billions of stitches in countless colours, leaving a yawning nothingness where there had once been so much light and life.

Killing his father had been galaxies away from his expectations; it had been like putting out a star when he’d anticipated a rush of certainty or  _anything_  to tell him that he’d done the right thing. He’d not been ready for his mother’s grief to come cascading into him a split-second later, keener and shriller, sharp as knives as it cleaved him down the middle.

Wiping his damp brow with his sleeve, Kylo turned and saw himself reflected in the viewport, which stretched wide enough to span an entire wall. Outside, moons and stars hung like baubles from invisible strings, all illuminated with a dream-soft, silvery-white glow, but Dromund Kaas thrust itself to the forefront. Steeped in Dark Side energy and shrouded in thunderclouds, the planet loomed over him as though trying to taunt him with both what he’d become and what he’d never be.

The planes of his face were bathed in searing saberlight and cast in harsh, shifting shadows, and something about the way the fiery colours flickered and danced across his features made him look starker and narrower. For reasons he didn’t quite understand, Kylo extinguished his blade and wandered over, stopping just short of pressing his palm flat against the viewport. Up close, with only inches of transparisteel to separate him and endless space, he could pretend that the  _Finalizer_  had simply melted away behind him, and that he had somewhere to go without it.

Maybe it was a trick of the light and nothing more, but he looked…  _ill._ Bloodless, almost, and hungry. His lips were bitten and chapped raw, and his hair was a limp mess about his collar. Absently, he trailed the tip of a gloved finger over a cheek that was hollower than he remembered, wondering if he’d lost weight without noticing. He hadn’t had much of an appetite for the past week, and what he had made himself eat to keep his strength up for training—the same calorie-controlled, regulated slop served throughout the ship, even if he did insist on dining alone in his quarters—had tasted like warmed-up ashes.

His appearance didn’t feel like him, whoever he was meant to be—except, of course, for the eyes, though they had belonged to Leia Organa first. They were almost the same shade of brown as hers: a steel-skinned woman with a kind, brave heart tucked underneath for safekeeping, who’d stood straight-spined in front of the stars and watched a planet die, just as he had.

_(“Mom, how come I’m an Organa and Dad isn’t?” Ben had asked when he’d been younger, when he’d been so small, Leia could pick him up and let him wrap his arms around her neck. “How come the three of us aren’t all Solos?”_

_Leia paused for a moment; she’d been in the midst of coaxing a tangle from his head of curls while he’d been trying his best not to fidget and squirm. She unfroze and brushed the knot out as though he hadn’t spoken, her careful fingers combing through his hair. After a minute, she pointed to the ornate mirror set atop her vanity table, all burnished silver with mother-of-pearl inlaid in the shape of leafy vines that wove around the frame._

_“Our eyes are the same, aren’t they?” When Ben answered with an eager nod, she went on, “That’s a little piece of me living forever in you, no matter what. And Alderaan lives in me, so I wanted it to live in you, too.” Leia met his gaze in the mirrorglass and gave him a tiny, faltering smile. Around her, the Force quivered. “As long as we Organas are alive, Ben, Alderaan is alive in us. Never forget that.”_

_Ben smiled for her, recognising that she was finding it difficult to try. Her hand hovered a fingerbreadth above her heart, as though instead of pitter-pattering, its beat would spell out Al-der-aan against her palm. She carried a crowd of ghosts within it, and he decided then and there that one day, he’d ask her for stories about her home and what it had been like. He’d ask her more about her adoptive parents—he wanted to know if Bail and Breha had ever held her by the wrists and swung her up to make her feel like she could fly, or if they’d ever scolded her for tracking in muddy footprints. He’d ask her about the slow, longing way she traced her fingers over the intricate carvings of songbirds and blossom sprigs on the wooden box that she called her_ keepsake chest,  _and what childhood treasures of hers she’d locked inside.)_

Kylo snarled to the empty room, shaking his head in a vain attempt to clear it.

Why did he care? He’d left Leia and all but one of Ben Organa’s things behind when he’d helped to destroy the Praxeum, and they had been irrevocably lost to him the very instant he’d lowered the shields around Nysa.

Before that day in the rain, Ben had owned three precious possessions, cherished above any other. He’d stowed two of them in the drawers of the nightstand next to his bunkbed, the key a comforting weight in the pocket of his robes. The first he’d seen again a week ago, when Padmé’s spirit had whisked him away to his old bedroom in Theed: a music box given to him as a newborn by a politician friend of Leia’s. A luminous miniature moon had rested on a pedestal inside, spinning around as its melody played, a traditional Alderaanian lullaby that twinkled like starlight and snowfall to lull him to sleep. The second was a length of meditation beads strung from bold amber sunblaze stones, a gift from his parents as he’d boarded the ship meant to pack him off for Luke to fix. He’d scowled then at how they were abandoning him, but at the Praxeum, he’d cradled them in his hands and ran them through his fingers.

He hadn’t imagined ever being without either, but for all the good it had done, he’d traded both with Unkar Plutt. He’d bartered them in exchange for a home, a never-ending supply of clean water, and a belly kept full of fine foods for Rey. Yet the girl he’d met in the forest on Takodana had been dressed in scraps of cloth, and she’d fought him like somebody who knew what it was to have to battle to survive.

A dull thud rang out as he slammed his fist against the transparisteel. It was a fruitless gesture, aimed at the murky blue orb of Dromund Kaas, as though he could shatter it apart from where he stood. If he had even more of a death wish, he could take a shuttle there, trudge through the jungle to the Dark Force Temple, brandish his lightsaber against Snoke, and pray that he’d at least succeed in slicing off a limb or two before Snoke strangled the life out of him. Pray that when Snoke discovered what he’d done—which would be a matter of hours, or days if he was lucky—he would go down fighting, and not jammed to the spot with fear.

He was still debating the impossible when the bond  _sang—_ there was no other word to describe how it thrummed and trilled between them as if it were a living thing—and his mind filled with  _her._

_Rey._

She was the warmest being in the whole galaxy, he thought; whether she’d intended to or not, she flooded him with a sea of molten honey-gold and ripened summer-bright yellows and sun-gilt clouds, all the colours of Jakku’s sands and skies. It was enough for him to forget about what lurked on Dromund Kaas and, with a dash of apprehension that he rushed to quash, he let her in.

At once, a dozen awful  _what-ifs_ reared their ugly heads, alongside a faint, wavering spark he didn’t dare to name. After all,  _something_  had to have happened for her to come to him.

“You were right; the Senate Building was bombed earlier this morning,” Rey hurried out. Her speech was so tight and so thin, he guessed that it had been mere minutes since she’d heard the news for herself. He couldn’t begin to fathom the distance that lay between them, but her voice sounded pitch-perfect, as though she were beside him. She took another moment for a steadying inhale before she breathed the words that sent his body sagging and a fierce lightness flaring in his chest: “Leia’s safe.” While he regained his footing, she added with an unfamiliar, halting softness, “I told her that it was you who’d warned me, like you said. She… she wasn’t as surprised as I’d expected her to be; I don’t think she’s ever stopped hoping for—for… You could have just  _let_  it happen to her, and to all those people, and you—”

“No,” Kylo interrupted her, startling himself with the volume of his voice, “I couldn’t.” He glanced up at his reflection in the viewport, at Leia Organa’s eyes watching him through his.  _“Never.”_

Rey fell silent for several heartbeats. In his own mind, he could almost feel the rapid-fire of her thoughts colliding with each other as she mulled over what he’d said. He could even see, hazy as if through fogged-up glass, the restless way she toyed with a hair tie around her wrist, twanging it against her skin.

“Well,” she replied at last, her feigned nonchalance nowhere near enough to fool him, “I wanted you to know that your ambitions of becoming—what was it?—a trophy on my wall aren’t going to happen. They weren’t anyway, but now, if you come back, there’s no way in the nine hells that Leia will let anyone put you to death. She’d probably slap somebody into the next planetary system just for suggesting it.” Her brilliant golden presence in the Force, both tangible and insubstantial, real and not real, grew dimmer. “She’d… fight tooth and nail for you,” she murmured.

At first, Kylo thought he detected jealousy there, but then realised with a jolt that it was something else, far quieter and sadder: a wistfulness that went as deep as the bone. Here was a girl who, more than anything in the universe, yearned for somebody—no, a  _parent,_ one who loved her with every fibre of their being—who would do the same for her. A strange, sentimental part of him wished that it would be as easy for him to restore her memories of her family to her as it would those of their days as children together at the Praxeum. He’d taken Nysa from her, that much was true, but her parents and her home and her last name, if she’d ever had one, had already been lost to her before they’d met.

She, too, understood the weakness she’d exposed, and around her enemy, no less. To a scavenger, it must have felt as stupid a mistake as strolling into a wreck unarmed. “It’s up to you what you do,” Rey said, too quickly to be casual, “but I want to know all about the Praxeum, and there’s only so much Luke can tell me. All I have is my imagination, Kylo Ren, and I want  _more.”_

Those final three words echoed in his head after Rey left him, vanishing in a blink and taking her warmth with her. Without it, without  _her,_ despite the layer of sweat clinging to his skin, the chill of the  _Finalizer’_ s recirculated air sunk into his veins, somehow even colder than usual. Before Kylo could shuck off a shiver that tried to crawl down his spine, the hairs at the back of his neck stood straight on end, and a wash of goosebumps prickled on his forearms.

All of a sudden, his entire body was on edge, as if aware of a  _wrongness_ that he could neither see nor sense for himself. Every well-honed instinct he possessed was urging him to flee, to  _getoutgetoutgetout,_ though when he whipped around, lightsaber lit and hissing a threat of its own, a flit-fast scan of the room revealed nothing crouching in the shadows but drooping droids and piles of unused mats—

Pulse racing, Kylo whirled back around, only to come face to face with his father’s ghost.

Whispers of near-faded scents accompanied him, floating in as if on a breeze: fuel, the worn nerf-leather of his jacket, and the warm spice-and-woodsmoke musk of a cologne that brought so many memories along with it, the space behind Kylo’s ribs ached. Underneath, however, Han Solo bore a taint, an inkblot stain that Kylo would have recognised anywhere.

It was not the Dark Side as he knew it. He’d learned as a boy in a padawan’s robes that his own Darkness could be a comfort as much as it was a fault, if he willed it. When the Light became too blinding, or when it demanded more of him than he could give, he could reach for what had always lived inside him and drape it around himself like a velvety blanket sewn from the richest, starriest night sky.  _This_  was ancient and cruel in comparison, as old as the crumbled statues of dead Sith glowering from the ground of the temple he’d spent the past six months training in.

His father had been to Dromund Kaas, and that mark—that aura—was stuck to him until he could shake it off. But why would Anakin Skywalker send him there, of all places?

Han’s face was a shade of sheer blue so pale, it was almost white. Worry etched itself into his features, widening his eyes and pulling a small vertical line between his furrowed brows. “You need to leave  _now,_ kid,” he said, keeping his voice low, as though afraid of being overheard. “You don’t have much time. Your creepy friends back down there—” he jerked his chin towards Dromund Kaas, “—have decided that it’s about time they got their crap together and got themselves a new master.”

A choked noise tumbled out of Kylo’s open mouth, but no proper words would form. For a moment, all he could do was gape uselessly, until he managed a dry-throated, disbelieving, “My Knights—”

Like a gaggle of cowards and not the warriors they were supposed to be, his Knights had planned to storm the ship in the middle of the night shift, when they could have expected him to be asleep, and so too groggy and muddled to fight well if snapped awake. They’d chosen to kill him not on a battlefield or even in a temple, where he’d granted Enyo Ren undeserved mercy just over a week ago, but in his quarters, six against one. While he knew that Enyo and perhaps Charon, who would follow wherever she went, would leap at the chance to do to him what he’d once done to Pollux, surely not Ankou. Not Phobos. Not Siqsa.

Kylo caught himself before he bleated out a pathetic  _all of them? Are you certain?_

“How?” he rasped instead.

_How did Anakin know to have you go to Dromund Kaas and listen? How did you, a being made of the purest energy of the Force and shaped from all things light and good, survive on a planet so ruined, the atmosphere itself is corrupted beyond repair?_

Han’s eyes softened, and when he smiled, it was the gentlest thing that Kylo had seen in years. “Told you I wasn’t going to abandon you, didn’t I?” He lifted a trembling, moonray-kissed hand and laid it on Kylo’s shoulder, where an impossible heat glowed through the heavy fabric of his surcoat, seeping into the very core of him like a brand. “What’s there… well, it’s dead, all right, but not quite dead  _enough_  for my liking. But,” he continued, with a much more Han-like shrug, “it was worth it, since me going to that miserable rock and putting up with the essence of Darth Whatchamacallit’s thousand-year-old corpse for twenty minutes means that my son doesn’t get turned into mincemeat.”

The twitch that tugged up half of Kylo’s mouth in response felt foreign, and oddly close to a smile of his own. A fraction of a second later, he came to his senses and tamped it down, scolding himself for wasting time that he couldn’t afford to lose. Even if he defeated each Knight who came to challenge him, or severed the ethereal threads connecting them to the Force, Snoke would soon realise that he’d been betrayed, and there would be no escaping then.

Clenching his fists until the leather of his gloves groaned, he dug his nails into the meat of his palms. “What do I do?”

“I’ll be the first to say I’m biased, kid, but I think you should go home.” Han’s smile grew until he shone bright enough to give off little motes of star-stuff; they drifted around him like lazy fireflies before winking out. Removing his hand from Kylo’s shoulder, he pointed to the belt cinching his waist. “Might want to get rid of that tracker before you do anything else, though.” At Kylo’s sharp intake of breath, he clarified, “That general—the one with the stick lodged where the sun won’t shine—had it put there way back when.”

Kylo stepped back and scowled, cursing Hux with every foul name he knew. All it took to crush the tracker was a moment to find where the device had been hidden, then another to tighten his fists and imagine it splintering until a satisfying  _crack_  resonated throughout the room. Shards of machinery barely bigger than grains of sand showered to the floor by his feet.

For good measure, or maybe for spite, he ground the shattered pieces to dust with the heel of his boot.

Han watched in uncharacteristic silence, his body blurring more and more. Each detail was losing focus, from the tawny flecks in his hazel eyes, to the scuffed patches on his jacket, to the scar on his chin, no doubt gained in some brawl somewhere. When Kylo had finished, he flashed him a lopsided grin. “I always knew you wouldn’t let that happen to your mom, Ben,” he said, with such faith woven into his words, Kylo almost couldn’t stand to hear it. “I mean, I had a scare, but… kriff, I wasn’t ready to see her again. Not like this, anyway. Not for a long while.”

“I wasn’t ready, either,” Kylo admitted, then shook his head and clamped his mouth shut around the lump in his throat. Too much—he’d said too much; he’d bared himself in a way that, for fifteen years, had been reserved for Snoke and for Snoke alone. He strode towards where he’d left his helmet, picked it up, and held it as though contemplating it. Before he hoisted it over his head, he murmured, his voice so quiet, it could have been swallowed up by the air, “I ought to have gone with you on Starkiller Base. When you asked me to come home.”

The truth of it was that he didn’t think he’d  _have_  a home to return to. As the light had faded, limning everything as far as the eye could see in a fierce, bloodthirsty red, he’d understood: the Ileenium system would be wiped out and Leia Organa would die with it, as her Alderaan once had. There would be nowhere else in the galaxy for him to go, no matter what he called himself.

“Six months.” Han’s voice made Kylo turn from where he stood by the door, only to see that his father’s ghost was disappearing fast, now not much more than a luminous silhouette that rippled like lakewater as he moved. “Six months,” he repeated, with a soft note of wonder in his tone, “that’s how long I’ve been waiting for you to admit the damned obvious, bandit.”

After his father had shimmered away, as he stomped through the  _Finalizer’_ s labyrinthine hallways, Kylo pushed all thoughts aside other than those of getting to the hangar. If he felt an anxious swoop in his stomach, or his heart fluttering like some winged, hopeful thing, he bit the inside of his cheek and forced himself to ignore it.

_With Snoke, I have a purpose,_ he’d told Rey in their meadow-dream. He’d lied through his teeth, trying to make  _himself_  believe it, and he could have sworn a laugh had bubbled up in her throat. She’d seen right through him.

Ben Organa had always been a terrible liar.

Now, at least, he had a purpose; a mission. It was almost deceptively simple, and had he more time to think, he might have searched for everything that could go wrong before throwing himself in headfirst. Secure a TIE fighter, fly it to some nondescript, middle-of-nowhere world, exchange it for another ship that couldn’t be tracked, and then—and then he could try to get to Alinor, since Han and Rey had been so insistent that there was a place for him there.

If there wasn’t, which he assumed would be the case—no sane member of the Resistance would want a monster living amongst them, not unless that monster had a blindfold over its eyes and a blaster aimed at the back of its skull—there would be hundreds upon hundreds of planets where no one would know of him. They wouldn’t know the name  _Kylo Ren,_ and they wouldn’t know to fear it. Perhaps those planets would be too far away for Snoke to sink his claws into his mind and rip and tear and  _take—_

It was just his luck that General Hux chose that moment to step into his path.

“Ren.” Hux straightened his shoulders, puffing himself up like an oversized peacock. If there were technologies that could have filled in Kylo’s many scars with synthskin, Hux had to have found some sort of experimental surgery that had twisted his expression into a permanent sneer. “Do you happen to know anything about  _why_  the assassination attempt that was planned against Leia Organa failed? How she managed to evade a bombing organised  _specifically_ to eliminate  _her?”_ One eyebrow cocked up, his fingers twitching as though burning to jab Kylo in the chest but, wisely, thinking better of it. “I sincerely hope none of this mess is due to  _your_ brutish interference, or the consequences will be on  _both_  of our heads.”

Thankful for the helmet obscuring his face, Kylo brushed past Hux as if he were nothing. “Perhaps, General, the failure is on your part, not mine,” he shot back. A swift glance behind him showed that his barbs had hit their mark: ruddy pink splotches were blooming high on Hux’s wan cheeks. “Perhaps the First Order failed to consider that Leia Organa is, unlike its stormtroopers, not subject to conditioning, and is free to decide against attending after all.” Solely to see Hux’s colour rise further, and to see if his ears would blaze scarlet, too, he offered, “She might have been ill.”

“Ill?” Hux sputtered. A muscle in his jaw jumped, and if he ground his teeth any more, he’d be spitting out sparks. “No senators attended the meeting in Coronet City. Not one. Not a single, solitary politician out of dozens upon dozens. I suppose next you’ll be telling me that an entire senate and all its staff fell  _ill,_ all at once?”

Kylo turned away, giving the slightest shrug. “I don’t see why not. I hear the Dantari flu is particularly virulent this time of year.”

He’d made it a few more precious steps, the hangar almost in sight, before Hux demanded, “Where are you going?”

_You’re welcome to try and stop me,_ Kylo thought,  _or do you have enough of a self-preservation instinct to prevent you from angering a man with a weapon that could slice you in two?_ Awareness of the lightsaber hooked into his belt itched at the corners of his mind until he sucked in a breath that chafed against his vocoder, letting it cool his temper. “I don’t believe I’m obligated to tell you, General,” he replied, as calm as he could muster.

Though doubtlessly assessing whether the massive repercussions of having him hurled out of an airlock would be worth it, Hux responded with a sniff. “I’m rather glad for your continued disappearances to whatever dark pit you keep on burrowing away in, you know,” he said, the venom in his voice almost corporeal, twining about him and hissing like a felinx. A squeak grated Kylo’s eardrums as Hux spun on his heels, about to march away. “In fact, in future, I’d prefer it if you  _didn’t_  creep out, Ren. I wouldn’t have to suffer through you skulking around  _my_ ship and  _ruining_ everything.”

Kylo waited until the sound of Hux’s boots clicking against the floor had ebbed away before he started walking again.

If he’d wanted to, he could have frozen Hux lock-stiff with a flick of his wrist, pried into his mind, and scoured through it to find out for himself just how much Snoke knew. But submerging himself in another person’s head meant being swamped in  _all_  their thoughts, from the most trivial to the most private, and he’d already picked up on too much of the thick, tarlike hatred that oozed from Hux’s every pore whenever they stood before Snoke’s projection in the audience chamber. Listening to it, unable to block it out, reminded him of being a small boy out in public, clutching his mother’s hand and wading through a stream of  _goodness such a solemn face for a child_ and  _stars above what are those ears._

_Great brute of a man,_ Hux would scoff, each thought tinged a sick, acidic green with envy.  _Useless if not for his strength in the Force otherwise what use would the Supreme Leader have for him none at all he could replace him now if he wanted—_

By the time Kylo reached the hangar, his heart was hammering so hard, he thought it might rattle the walls.

A cursory look around drew his gaze to a TIE Interceptor, which eyed him through its circular viewport as though it had been expecting him. With palms slick with sweat in their gloves, he shoved himself inside, and found that by some mercy, it had been outfitted with a hyperdrive. Before he could spread his clammy fingers over the dashboard controls and request authorisation to depart—not that a skilled Force user would ever truly need it—a familiar voice called his name.

He recognised it, along with the colours that her presence ushered in with it. Where Enyo Ren was a bleeding ink-dark smudge and Rey the gold of dawn and dusk, she was all the glossy, shifting tones of a raven’s feather: jet-blacks and indigos and smoky midnight purples.

_We’re coming,_ Ankou Ren whispered.  _You know why, and you need to be gone before we get there. Cloak yourself in the Force; she can’t know where you are._

She was gone before he could react, leaving him on the verge of letting out a bark of surprised laughter. He’d known her since Saarai had plucked her from the lower levels of Coruscant and brought her to them as a whip-thin slip of a young woman; even then, it had been rare for her to speak through the Force and rarer still for her to speak aloud. Despite that, and despite being shrewd enough to understand that in not betraying him, she was betraying Enyo, she’d come to warn him. From her—from somebody so silent and always content to watch—it felt like a gift.

Just before he drew the Force around him like a veil of shadows and prepared to fly, he grasped the silver and gold threads that intertwined him and Rey and gave them a gentle pull.

_Elan,_ he sent to her as the TIE began to rumble, pushing the word across the systems. It was the first planet he’d thought of, a tiny, stormy rock nestled in the middle of the Outer Rim. He remembered it from several years ago: the First Order had once visited to collect valuable cortosis ore from the mines there, but the mines had run dry and, deeming it worthless, they’d never returned.

_I’ll be on Elan. If there’s still a place for me after everything, find me there._

 

* * *

 

A holodrama was babbling on and on in Finn’s quarters, spinning an elaborate tale of the warring factions of a far-off planet in the Hapes Cluster, and from what Rey could tell, containing enough bloodshed to rival a real battlefield.

Finn and Poe were both equally wide-eyed, leaning forwards as they drank in every last word and scene. Rey had sandwiched herself between the two of them on Finn’s bed, but she heard nothing, as though the holo’s sounds were sailing into her ears and then getting lost somewhere inside. Her mind was a maze, her nerves jangled, and her heart felt as if it had sprouted a miniature pair of wings, fluttering hummingbird-fast not just in her chest, but in her head, too, making it impossible to think of anything else. She hugged her knees close and pushed her back against the wall, keeping quiet and trying to ignore the fight-or-flight prickling that needled at the top of her spine.

On Jakku, where one misstep could mean being robbed at best and murdered at worst, she’d had no choice but to pay attention to it. To bare her teeth and dart her narrowed eyes around to root out the source of an unexpected noise, to tighten her fists around her quarterstaff, and to ready herself to guess the weakest, softest spots on any given being, those guaranteed to bring them down.

Now, there was little she could do for the nausea roiling in her gut; it wasn’t hers alone. Light-years away aboard some lifeless, colourless ship where no one laughed, somebody else’s palms were so damp with cold sweat, they needed to wipe them on their thighs. Twice, she’d almost thrown her voice out like an arrow spearing across the stars and demanded,  _What are you doing?_ She’d told herself that if she did, it would have been out of frustration and not anything that even resembled concern, but she’d still reined in that impulse each time.

Rey didn’t know what she hoped Kylo Ren’s answer would be, or why she didn’t just try to shut him out, which only vexed her more. She tried to distract herself, praying that neither Finn nor Poe would notice the speed of her pulse or the hard line of her mouth.

A scavenger—at least, one who planned on staying alive—would make it a priority to learn their surroundings by rote. Sometimes, if she came across a recent wreck, she’d map it out in its entirety, memorising the entrances and the exits; all the bolt-holes and the pieces of scrap that she could trade or maybe even keep. Luke had made her dune-dweller’s habit into a trick they’d use before they meditated together, knowing that she often struggled to clear her mind. He’d ask her to close her eyes and describe to him what she saw in the Force, and he’d wait, his lips tilted up in a calm smile, for her awestruck reply of  _I see a dragonfly_ or  _there are three birds in the tree above us, a mother and her two babies._

Finn had hung the stitched-up jacket on a hook by the door, so that it was the first thing anyone would see if they walked in. He, Jess, and Poe would swap it between them, offering it to her every now and then, but Rey loved the jacket that Leia had sewn for her the most. While she kept plants on her shelves, Finn’s groaned under the weight of stacks of holobooks—fiction, she supposed, though he’d devoured every bit of galactic history that the Resistance could give him. On his windowsill lay the large peach-pink conch shell that she’d brought him from Ahch-To; his face had lit up as she’d beamed and told him that if he held it up to his ear, he’d hear the ocean roaring.

The tapestries on his walls were the brightest. He’d bought them on off-planet trips with Poe, where they’d wandered through a dozen markets, each an eye-searing explosion of colour. One was of a tree bearing rich, golden autumn leaves; the next a bird with iridescent feathers like oil spills; another a ship jetting off into a backdrop of pinprick stars and nebulae embroidered with glittery thread; and he’d told her that he’d felt bizarrely  _compelled_  to buy the last. Its design was of shafts of radiant sunrays breaking apart a storm cloud, letting a strip of blue sky peek through.

After a lifetime of having to share his space with so many others, he’d made his room his own.

Rey knew the feeling. When she’d been shown to her new quarters after coming from Ahch-To, she’d stood in bewilderment and realised that it would have taken her  _weeks_ of bartering to buy the bars of soap in the ‘fresher, smelling of lavender or vanilla or citrus or milk and honey, and even more for the soft blankets and pillows stuffed with snowbird feathers. They and Leia’s jacket had been the first things that she’d been able to have for herself without needing to guard them—not that another scavenger would have wanted to steal her cloth doll or her collection of dried spinebarrel flowers, or that they’d have survived her booby-trapped AT-AT if they had.

It had taken her almost a month to dare to add anything of her own, she remembered. When she had at last, she’d chosen flowers: a sprig of centaureas she’d picked in the clearing, with spidery petals in different shades of pinks and purples. Next, there had been the gorsa blossoms, glowing like muted candlelight, then the delicate white velanies with their cloven leaves, and then the bluebells.

A fond smile had scarcely grazed her lips before her pulse rate spiked and her lungs refused to hold enough air.

She tried to breathe, but a maelstrom of emotions too confusing for her to name engulfed her, swept in on a torrent of too-familiar silver. The heart slamming against her ribs as if about to leap out became both hers and not hers, and all of a sudden, Finn’s quarters disappeared and her field of view filled with more stars than she’d ever be able to count. A dwarf planet canopied in clouds swam in front of her, so vivid, she could have reached out and cupped it in her palms. Her hands—no, they weren’t hers; hers were smaller and bare—spread across a set of blinking dashboard controls, preparing to take flight.

_I’ll be on Elan,_ Kylo Ren said. Rey shivered: he sounded as though he was both millions of miles away and right beside her, whispering a phantom warmth into her ear.  _If there’s still a place for me after everything, find me there._

_Wait!_ she called after him as he left her, searching with blind fingers for some lingering silvery-grey tendril to yank and pull him back. Her shout was a golden starburst in the Force as she cried out,  _What’s happening?_

Kylo Ren didn’t respond, and nor did he give any sign that he’d heard her at all. The bond—that  _thing_ flowing between them that sometimes felt as though it might be as alive as they were, if not impossibly  _more_ so—had gone grave-silent.

For one electrifying moment that felt like it stretched on forever, Rey was falling with nothing solid, nothing  _real_  to grip on to. When she came back to herself and crash-landed in her own body, which fit her far better than Kylo Ren’s had, she could breathe again, smelling the clean laundry mixed with fresh air scent of Finn’s quarters, not the tang of sweat and ozone.  _Her_  desert-roughened hands were bunched in her lap, her knuckles pale dots, and once she looked around with  _her_  eyes, not Ren’s, she saw that Finn and Poe were staring at her.

Finn’s eyebrows furrowed. “Elan? You mean the mining planet?”

Rey’s face flamed red-hot: she must have blurted it out loud. “I—I don’t know anything about an Elan,” she mumbled. Then, because there was no point in hiding what had just happened, not from her dearest friend, she said weakly, “Kylo Ren told me he’d be there, but he was gone before he could say why.”

Letting loose a gust of breath, Poe switched off the holodrama. “Easy enough to guess, isn’t it?” he prompted, without glancing at either of them. “If they’ve not found out about Corellia yet, they will have soon, and if I were him, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere within fifty parsecs of them once they do.” He turned to face her, leaning on his elbow against a pillow, and when he spoke again, his tone carried with it the strain of false nonchalance. “So, I take it that it comes down to you and Luke to go and get him, huh?”

“I’ll have to tell Luke and Leia, and then we’ll decide what to do from there, I suppose.” Rey clutched the duvet for balance and lifted herself up, meaning to clamber off the bed and make her way to Leia’s office, but her legs trembled and buckled underneath her, not even strong enough to support a skittermouse. Kylo Ren’s presence had vanished, but the metallic aftertaste of his fear still cloyed on her tongue and clogged her throat. Edging herself back down, she gritted her teeth, willing strength into her unsteady limbs. “They’ll—they’ll want to leave immediately, won’t they? If he’s had to flee so suddenly?”

“Wait a minute,” Finn interrupted, before Poe could open his mouth to reply, “you’re just going to fly off to Elan, where the First Order used to mine cortosis?” Shaking his head, he continued, “As far as I know, they’ve forgotten about it; they bled the mines dry and left it to rot, like they do with everything that’s no longer useful to them. I can believe that Ren won’t come and kill us after what he did, but the First Order?” He held up a hand, stopping Rey in her tracks before she could cut in. “Look, just hear me out: what if he’s being tracked unawares and ends up bringing them straight to us? I know what they’re capable of—letting him come to us, lying low so we think we’re in the clear, and then wiping us all out in the middle of the night is _precisely_  the kind of thing they’d do.”

Poe’s dark eyes sparkled. “Why do I have the feeling that if the General heard you say that, she’d put on her best game face and say, ‘Well, let them come!’?”

Rey, too, could imagine it with perfect clarity: the proud set of Leia Organa’s chin, the tiniest of shakes in her voice, and the powerful, incandescent  _love_  that always eddied around her whenever she spoke of her son, making Rey ache for what she’d never known. She wanted Ren to give her memories back to her most of all, but she also wanted to confront him, to square her jaw and ask him _how could you leave her?_ Even then, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to understand.

“Finn’s right, though,” Poe said to her, serious now. “Every single one of us on base has seen what they can do, some more than others. And, Rey, I know you, and I know you’re a good person who’s been taking ‘Saving People 101’ classes from Luke Skywalker, so me trying to talk you out of it will be like having a conversation with a brick wall. So, if you  _are_  gonna insist on going, me and the rest of Black Squadron could be your backup, just in case you need us.”

Rey frowned. “It’s not about  _saving_  him,” she replied, though the words felt like a lie as soon as they’d left her lips. “He’s Leia’s only child, not to mention he’s the reason she’s  _alive_  right now, and the same goes for nearly all of the Senate.” She couldn’t help but catch the flicker-fast wince that shot across Poe’s features at the thought, or the subtle way Finn’s gaze flitted to the jacket on its hook, then back to her. “If he dies, then almost everything she has goes with him. Everything—” she swallowed, “—everything that Han died for goes to waste.”

“Ren might be everything that General Organa has left, sure, but even if she needs him,  _we_  need  _you,”_  Finn said, his eyes wide and sincere. “I know you want to fight for what you think is worth it, but…” Trailing off, he rubbed the heel of his palm over his brow and released a shallow sigh. “I fought him, Rey,” he went on quietly, his fingers flexing, as if his very flesh remembered the barely-there weight of Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber humming against his cold-bitten skin. “I fought him when it was either that or let him take you and do who-knows-what with you, and I’ve got the repairs in my spine to prove it.”

At once, without speaking, all three of them looked over at the jacket. A column of stitches snaked up its back in the exact shape of a lightsaber’s slash, framed with the faintest of brown-black scorch marks. Rey wondered, not for the first time, if Finn was comforted or troubled by the fact that in return, Ren now wore a similar scar etched on him from the root of his nose to the hollow dip of his clavicle.

_I’ve fought him, too,_ she almost argued, but she hadn’t, not like Finn had on Starkiller Base. Frightened and chilled to the bone with flurrying snow, without the Force and without ever having wielded a lightsaber before, Finn had duelled Kylo Ren solely to protect her and he’d paid the price. She and Ren had clashed again on Heorot and Boreas, where the wind had whipped her cheeks pink-raw and numbed her fingers until they were frozen too stiff to move, but though she’d been afraid, there had been no true hatred there.

On Boreas, when Ren had slipped on the ice, she hadn’t thrust her blade into his throat. When she’d turned her back and walked away, he hadn’t surged up and given chase to strike her down.

Finn chewed his bottom lip for a moment, then began in a softer and more measured voice, “I don’t like the idea of you going to Elan to retrieve Ren, but it’s not up to me to tell you what to do. I’ve had enough of that for myself to last me a lifetime, and besides, I’m your friend, not your Jedi Master, yeah?” As Rey felt herself smiling, he averted his eyes to the backs of his hands, as though searching there for the words he wanted. “At Tuanul, when I refused to kill for them, I told myself that I was going to do the right thing, only it’d be  _my_  version of it, not theirs. And then I did it: I didn’t shoot. Well, it was harder than that, and there was a great deal more internal conflict involved, but you get the picture. When I defected with Poe—” he flashed Poe a grin, which Poe shot back in an instant, “—I thought the same thing.”

Poe’s grin grew lazy. “You asked, and the best pilot in the Resistance provided.”

“If you honestly think the right thing to do is to bring Ren back to Genera Organa, then that’s your choice. But I don’t know if I’ll have it in me for a while to willingly hang around him.” Finn gave her a flimsy little half-smile and added, “So no friendly pazaak games in the rec rooms, I guess.”

“I knew him.” Poe sat up then, his expression unreadable. Trying to puzzle him out through a feather-light touch of the Force felt like peering into a kaleidoscope: his emotions were an odd blend of mismatched colours, all wrapped in a swirl of near-sheer, nostalgic pink. “Which is what makes this whole thing so damn difficult, you know? When we were kids, he and his parents would come to Yavin IV—my homeworld—every now and then, to see my mom and dad.”

The memories  _had_  to be painful for him to dredge up, Rey knew, but curiosity got the better of her—as it almost always did. “You knew him?”

“Yeah, strange kid.” Poe’s mouth twisted to the side. Without her having to prod him for more, he continued after a brief pause, “I was a few years older, so I was drafted in to be his buddy and babysitter all in one, and we’d play together and get into trouble—normal kid stuff. This one time, we were exploring not far from my house when we found a honeyblossom tree; they have these trumpet-shaped flowers that drip the sweetest nectar you’ll ever taste. Obviously, we drank  _way_  too much of it.” He smiled, and Rey echoed it, a hazy image of a young, bright-eyed Poe and a Ben with a wild mess of hair forming in her mind. In her head, Ben was already closing in on Poe in height. “No one except Solo was laughing when two sticky kids stumbled in, about to throw their guts up.”

“But as he got older, he got… quieter.” Poe’s smile faded, and his eyebrows knitted together. “Not your usual sullenness, either, where they’re growing up and they think everything sucks because it’s mandatory to at that age. No, he was—I think he was about eight, and I must have been eleven when it was just me and Dad, when he started to get more and more withdrawn. The last time I saw him then, he visited us for four days and I heard him speak maybe twice.”

An invisible fist curled around Rey’s heart and squeezed like a vice: when Kylo Ren plunged into Poe’s head in the interrogation chamber, had he seen two children sprawled under a honeyblossom tree, with sore, full bellies and nectar-sticky mouths and fingers? Had he remembered the sound of his own laughter?

Most importantly, had it shaken him at all, or had he brushed it off and told himself,  _I killed that weak, foolish boy?_

“And—I don’t think I’ve told you guys anything about this before,” Poe went on, then corrected himself with a hasty, “Actually, I might have told Finn.” For the smallest of moments, Rey felt like an outsider wedged between them, but that creeping sense of isolation washed away once she saw the answering warmth in Finn’s eyes as he listened. “But after Starkiller Base, before we left D’Qar, I was with the General and she mentioned Ben. When she did, I swear I wanted to scream; I wanted to yell, ‘Your Ben tortured me! That boy I knew is  _gone!’_ But I didn’t, for her, and because even when he was ripping his merry way through my brain, I  _still_  thought of him as Ben.” Poe shrugged, a wry quirk pulling up his lips. “That’s what the hardest part was: recovering from everything and getting to grips with the fact that I _knew_  the person who’d done that to me. I suppose that’s why I want to believe her when she says he can come home, not just because it’ll break her if she’s wrong.”

A barrage of questions— _what was it like did you fight back_ could  _you fight back—_ seared the tip of Rey’s tongue in their impatience to be set free, but she didn’t dare try her luck. Poe had given her enough without expecting anything in return; he’d let her see a fragment of Ben Organa, who was in turn a piece of  _her._

Instead, she slid off the bed, exhaling in relief to find that she now had a functioning pair of legs, not two wobbling fawn-limbs. “I’m going to go and see Leia,” she announced, and though it was asking the impossible, she added, “I’ll be careful, but please, don’t worry about me.”

Poe huffed. “No promises.”

Almost at the same time, Finn muttered, “I’ll worry, all right, and I’ll  _keep_ worrying until I see you landing back here.”

Rey had just pressed the button to open the door when Finn called out a hesitant, “Hey, wait.” She whirled around to face him, standing in the threshold with the drone of chatter buzzing low in the corridor behind her.

Finn shifted to the edge of the bed, clasping and unclasping his fingers. Without looking her in the eye, he started, “While Poe was talking, I was thinking of something that happened maybe a year or two ago, when I was still a stormtrooper.”

It was rare for him to speak of what it had been like to be a stormtrooper, and their friends usually chose not to bring it up. They’d silently understood when he used to stiffen at the sound of a command being barked out, or when—this she’d heard second-hand from Poe—he’d awakened from his coma and struggled to get out of his medbay bed not a day later, batting away the droids and asking for her all the while. Stormtroopers, after all, hadn’t been allowed to slacken off. When he did let himself speak of those days, his words would begin halting and slow to unravel at first, then at last he’d grow even-voiced and matter-of-fact, his spine straightening tall in a private act of defiance.

Finn took a deep breath. “We did training sims all the time,” he said. “Sometimes, they’d be virtual reality, and other times, they’d send us out there for real. Get us to attack a base or quash an uprising, that kind of thing. Once, a member of my squadron messed up during a target shooting exercise. Nothing major, but his reaction times were way off. An officer wanted him sent to reconditioning, even though it was a minor mistake.” His fists clenched, and with her stomach churning, Rey decided that she didn’t want to know what happened to a person during reconditioning. “Anyway, Phasma argued.” At Poe’s incredulous glance, Finn frowned and admitted, “Yeah, I was as surprised as you are. She told the officer where to shove it, and said—I remember, so clearly—that only five people on record had ever broken their conditioning. And the crazy thing was: I caught her looking at  _me_  as she said that, like she  _knew_ what I was going to do.”

“The First Order thought their conditioning was unbreakable, but I’m living proof that it can be done.” Finn looked up, first at Rey, then at Poe, then at the tapestry of the storm cloud sliced apart by beams of sunlight. “Maybe I never really believed in any of it,” he said, still facing the tapestry, as though unable to tear his gaze away, “but the point is: there were people who  _did,_  who ate up every lie they were fed, and then they got out.” He shrugged. “What I’m trying to say is that I do think people can change who they are and what they believe in. I  _have_  to, otherwise what I’ve just said makes no sense to me. Ren wasn’t conditioned, even if he had Snoke breathing down his neck since the womb, or whatever, but I didn’t think he’d ever do anything good, and now I’m not so sure where I stand. Just—it’ll take me a while, okay?”

“I get it.” Rey nodded, a fizzy kind of weightlessness spreading from her fingertips to her toes. She always felt like that, airy and momentarily untouchable, whenever she thought of how people  _cared_  for her, and best of all, didn’t want to lose her.

Not like her family—whoever they were—had, in fire and smoke and ringing bells.

Finn caught her eye. “Be safe, will you? Whatever you’re planning on doing.”

 

* * *

 

In Leia’s office, Rey watched as Luke scrolled through a star map with his flesh-and-blood hand, his grey-brown eyebrows pinched together in concentration as he hunted for Elan.

Leia herself wouldn’t, or even _couldn’t,_ stay still. At first, she eyed the map from beside Luke, examining his every movement, then she busied herself by sliding open a drawer unlocked with a biometric scan, her lips thinning into a pale line at the sight of its contents. Feathery wisps of hair were escaping from the loose crown braid coiled atop her head, and to Rey, it looked as if the tiny bird-foot wrinkles at the corners of her eyes had deepened in worry.

When Rey had told her about Kylo Ren’s message, Leia had sagged into her desk chair with a soft  _Ben_  that had sounded more like an outbreath than a boy’s name, allowed herself perhaps a minute for a hail of questions— _is he all right is he hurt did he say what happened—_ and then sprung up into action, every bit the general.

Luke, meanwhile, had listened to her story and then rushed to a star map so quickly, Rey could have sworn that he’d had the wind itself behind his feet.

“I can’t imagine what I’ll be getting when—no,  _if—_ Ben comes home,” Leia confessed to neither of them in particular. Over the jangling noises of her rifling through the drawer, her voice was as brittle as a pressed flower, too delicate to touch.

Rey scolded herself for snooping, but she couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of an odd little  _thing_  resting inside the drawer, made out of purple and yellow cloth. When she squinted, she realised that it was a stuffed tooka-cat toy, with two black buttons for eyes. She’d once seen one like it on Jakku, when she’d been young enough to crave such things: she’d found it sun-bleached and half-buried in the dunes, its pointy ears poking up out of the sand, and she’d meant to come back for it after she’d finished trading her scraps for the day.

By the time she’d returned, of course, somebody else had taken it. That was how the world had worked on Jakku: finders keepers, losers weepers.

In hindsight, she’d thought that night, curled up in her hammock in her AT-AT, it had probably belonged to a child of one of the richer merchant families. One of those with the mingling scents of fresh-baked bread— _proper_ bread; the fluffy, melt-in-the-mouth kind—and spices that made the inside of her nose tingle drifting out of their colourful tents. After that, she’d made her own doll out of a salvaged rebel flight suit, scavenged twine, and several fistfuls of sand.

“I’ve been trying to picture it, the moment we meet again, and I don’t know if he’ll call me ‘Mom’ or if it’ll be a battle just getting him to let me near him. Or if I’ll—if I’ll even be able to recognise my own son.” Leia’s small fingers closed around the tooka-cat doll as though meaning to take it out and cradle it against her chest, then she dropped it as suddenly as if burned. “I don’t know  _what_  I want from him. If I want him to say that he’s sorry, or if I want to reach out to him if he’ll let me and say that  _I’m_ sorry, or if I want to stand far away and ask, ‘How could you?’, or if I want to hug him so tight, I almost snap his ribs.”

“That makes two of us,” Luke murmured. “They’re going to want to see him answer for what he’s done, you know,” he added, his gaze flickering up towards his sister, then back down to the stars and hyperspace routes glowing at his fingertips. “Getting him home might be the easy part.”

An immobilising spike of fear bulleted through Rey’s body and pinned her in place: if Ren was to be punished, would she feel it, too? Leia would fight for his life, she knew, but all the same, awful mental images skittered about her skull, too fast to seize and shred to pieces.

She saw Ren shackled and sallow-cheeked in a grey cell, and the view of nothing but bars and blank walls swimming before her whenever she closed her eyes.

It took her next thought—Ren with his hands bound in front of a firing squad—for her to crack and ask, “What do you think will happen to him?”

Wrist-deep in the drawer crammed with what Rey guessed were keepsakes and old, sentimental things that she couldn’t bear to throw away, Leia picked up a scuffed leather-bound notebook. As she opened it, Rey craned her neck and caught the first few words:  _once upon a time,_ inked in a sloping sea of High Galactic script far neater than her own handwriting would ever be.

“Hells if I know,” Leia replied at length, sighing. “He saved our skins, but there’ll have to be a hearing. We don’t practise the death penalty even if some New Republic planets do, and knowing them, they’ll ask for it, but I’m sure the Organa name still has some clout. Failing that, they might demand that Ben be exiled to some nowhere world, or banned for life from the Inner Core.” Shaking her head, she gravitated towards a hairbrush made from shining silver so reflective, Rey imagined that she’d be able to see her face in it, its back topped with an iridescent material that gleamed like pearls turned liquid. On Jakku, it would have kept her fed for a month. “I’ll do everything I can for him; everything in my power.”

Luke looked up. “I’ll state my case, of course,” he said. “I’ll insist that I train him alongside Rey.”

Before Rey could make up her mind as to whether to protest or agree, Leia flinched. Slowly, she withdrew her hands from the drawer, staring at Luke as if meeting him for the first time. “You’d… you’d do that?” she whispered. “I thought the Jedi were only allowed one padawan each.”

“The Jedi—” Luke tapped at the star map a degree harder than necessary, “—are dead.” Though he was careful to direct his focus towards his task again, the bottomless blue lake of his Force signature swelled and frothed. “Besides, Leia, you know how I feel about politicians— _most_  politicians, anyway. They’ll probably order us to suppress Ben’s access to the Force, and I can’t allow that. It’d be like robbing him of one of his senses.” He paused, and Rey knew then that he was thinking of his students from long ago— _her_ fellow students, who’d scattered about the galaxy, each as invisible as a blown-out flame. “At least if I train him, he’ll be doing something productive with his abilities,” he went on, the cadence of his voice heavy with a fake lightness. “Let’s see if this time around, I manage to get it right.”

Rey frowned at him, wishing that there was something,  _anything,_ that she could say to make him stop blaming himself for what had happened on Nysa all those years ago. No one, not unless they were all-powerful, could ever have foreseen it.

He couldn’t have known that he’d leave the planet and come back to discover the Praxeum ruined almost beyond repair. To his students vanished, a wound slashed in the fabric of the Force, and his youngest learner spirited away across the stars, entrusted to a junkboss who’d never had any intention of making certain that she’d be cared for.

“I’ve found Elan—it’s about a twelve-hour flight away.” Luke turned to Rey, speaking before she could burst out with a cry of  _none of it was your fault!_ “We can leave now, if you’d like, or we can wait until the morning.”

A fleeting glance out the window told Rey that the day was dying. Late afternoon light streamed in through a group of trees with haloes of crisp, yellowing leaves, gilding the flyaway strands of Luke’s hair and tinting everything with a wash of icy blue. It took no more than a moment for her to decide: having felt the sweat beading on Ren’s forehead and the frantic rabbit-thump of his heartbeat under his surcoat, she knew that he didn’t  _have_  all the way until the morning and the journey to Elan on top of it.

“Now,” she said firmly.

Luke nodded and gave her a ghost of a smile. As he drew himself upright, gathering his slate-grey robe around him, Leia delved into the drawer again. This time, she emerged carrying two clip-on tracking devices, holding one out to each of them.

“I want you both to have these, just in case,” she told them while Luke attached his to his belt, Rey following suit. “We’ll be keeping track of you until you touch down on base again, so if there’s a problem, you can press the little button on the front and we’ll know to get to you as quickly as we can. If there’s a struggle—if the First Order finds out somehow—I won’t ask you to bring him back, not if you’re in danger, and I don’t expect you to drag him home, kicking and screaming.” Leia’s lips quirked up. “Especially not you, Rey.”

“What do you mean?”

Leia’s smile became gentle, and she reached out to take Rey’s hand in hers. “I don’t expect you to have any involvement with him if you don’t want it, even if Luke does start training him with you. You can avoid him completely afterwards, if that’s what you want; I’m not going to assign you the task of bringing him to the Light.” Giving Rey’s hand a small squeeze, she continued, “It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask so much of a young woman who already has the entire galaxy to deal with, and in the end, it’s  _his_  choice where he belongs, not ours.”

Rey wouldn’t ever be able to have nothing to do with Kylo Ren, or Ben Organa, no matter what he called himself. He was entwined with her very being in a tangle of silver and gold threads, but she returned Leia’s smile nonetheless. “He can give my memories back,” she replied. “I want to remember Luke, and the boy Ky—Ben was, and who  _I_ was. Luke said I didn’t remember anything from… from before, so I’m not hoping that I’ll suddenly remember who my parents are or where I’m from, but all I have of myself is pieces—pieces and stories—and I want something  _real.”_ Leia was looking at her with such kind, understanding eyes, and Rey didn’t know whether to let herself lean into it or to shrink away. “I think,” she said, forcing herself to meet Leia’s eyes, “it might be easier to… to forgive him if I can see him as the boy he once was. We used to be good friends, Luke says.”

“I never knew.” There was sadness in Leia’s smile now, overpowering it until it faltered and faded. “He didn’t give away very much whenever we holocalled him, just short answers and yeses, maybes, and nos. We did ask if he’d made any new friends—we  _hoped_  that he had; it’d been so long since he’d had a friend—but he wouldn’t say.”

In a fit of courage before she and Luke left to prepare for their journey, Rey turned back to Leia and asked, “Why did you and Han send him away?” Then, inwardly cringing at her own boldness, she hurried to apologise a second after she’d let the words loose.

Leia, however, didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps she’d been waiting for her to ask. She walked over to her caf machine on a counter and started pouring herself a hot cup.

“He was such a mischievous boy,” she began over the high-pitched whine of the machine, her back to them. “All muddy knees and impish grins, but… well, he stopped; he stopped talking so much, as if a light inside him had gone out. It seemed like he was spending all his time in his head, and he’d get migraines often. Han and I—we were away a lot, and sometimes, when I met with the Senate, he and Ben would come with me.” Leia stirred, blew a fine mist of steam from the cup’s rim, and took an experimental sip. “Ben liked it when we visited other planets, but not when I had to go to meetings. He was eleven when it happened. All day, he’d been tetchy, and as we were walking through Eufornis City on Eufornis Major, he mumbled about how he didn’t trust the man behind us. I brushed it off—stupid, I know—as him being unhappy because he’d had to trail after me, watching me discuss politics with stuck-up people.”

“And then—” Her petite frame deflated with a sigh, and her hands shook around the cup until she had to rest it on her desk so as not to spill it. “And then Ben screamed, this horrible ear-splitting  _shriek,_ and the man went flying into the wall, and there was so much blood.” Leia gripped the edge of the desk, as though she were about to sink. “Ben was as white as a sheet, clinging to me like he used to when he was very young, and he showed me through the Force that the man—a sympathiser of what would become the First Order—had a blaster, and he’d been about to shoot me. We had to explain to stars-know-how-many guards, but Ben… he wouldn’t speak. When we got him home, he still wouldn’t say a word. I worried…” Her voice broke, and she took a long drink to mask it. “I worried that I’d lost him for good. He was so  _scared,_ and nothing we said would comfort him, so sending him to Luke felt like the only thing I  _could_  do.”

“I don’t know if I could have pulled him back,” Luke muttered roughly, “but I sure helped him over the edge.”

“All three of us did—me, you, and Han,” Leia said, pain writing itself on her features and thickening her voice. Though her eyes were red-ringed and over-bright, stubbornness kept them dry. “I think… I think he heard me and Han talking about him, once: Han said something about there being ‘too much Vader’ in him, and that was around the time he… changed.” She looked up at where Luke stood by the doorway and bit her lip, steeling herself before carrying on, “I  _hated_  what I went through because I was _his_  daughter, and how hard it was to get people to trust me because of him. I didn’t talk about Va—Anakin, besides the fact that he came back, so I must have made him into some, I don’t know, some shadowy monster-figure. If Ben had questions about him, even innocent ones, I’d clam up.”

“You weren’t there at the end.” Crossing the room, Luke laid his cybernetic hand on his twin’s shoulder, his words soft. “You haven’t seen him as he is now, and he knows not to try, not until you ever  _want_  him to. I can’t expect you to forgive him as I have.”

“But the thing is—” Leia almost drained her cup, “—I’d answer anything else he wanted to know, and he was such a curious little boy. Give him a book and he’d sit down and read it from front to back; give him a piece of machinery and he’d take it apart to see how it worked. I’d tell him about Alderaan, and the crystal palaces and the grass paintings and all our music, from the mourning-songs to the children’s rhymes. I’d tell him about Padmé, and what she stood for. I’d tell him about Bail and Breha, and how much I loved them.” Here, with a wisp of a smile, she traced her fingertips over the birds and blossoms carved on the chest on her desk, so detailed, Rey could make out individual feathers and petals. “I’d tell him about the Rebellion, and the battles we fought, but if he asked about Vader, I just… couldn’t.”

There was a strange tightness in Rey’s lungs that she couldn’t explain away as belonging to Kylo Ren. Was it that she wanted that kind of love, a kind like Luke and Leia had, like  _family_  had? Or was it that she couldn’t fathom being a child and knowing that the people closest to her were  _afraid_  of her, and would whisper nervously about what she might grow to be?

“They don’t give you a guidebook when it comes to raising children, least of all Force-sensitive ones,” Leia finished wearily. “I just had to hope that I was doing what was best for him, and too late, I realised that I wasn’t. He never had a chance.”

Leia gave herself a shake, swept Luke into a hug, then approached Rey and, without hesitating, did the same to her. For half a breath, Rey stayed stock-still, not knowing what to do with her own hands, but then settled on clutching Leia close. Against her, Leia was so slight, and she smelled of warm caf, along with ginger and faint perfume from the flowers in her vases. Rey didn’t have much at all to go on, but it was how she imagined a mother might smell.

“Thank you for listening to me talk about him, even when you didn’t have to,” Leia murmured. “Whatever happens, thank you.”

 

* * *

 

At last, after what felt like it must have been eons, Kylo Ren piloted his TIE towards a stretch of flat ground, lit by lines upon lines of white cat’s-eye lamps. As he drew closer, they glinted and glimmered in the pouring rain, almost as if they were beckoning him.

When he landed, the rain battered the TIE’s roof and beat against the viewport, rushing down in never-ending, writhing rivers. For a moment, Kylo sat unmoving, watching the downpour. It was the kind of storm where one could step outside and lose themselves in an instant, where they’d become nothing more than a blurry, shifting shape, boxed in on all sides by falling sheets of water. Aside from the tiny lamps and a few sliver-thin slats of sunlight peeking through the swollen clouds, Elan was pitch-dark, as though under a permanent spell of night from an old Nabooian story that he half-remembered.

Around him, everything was eerily silent, as if the very Force itself was holding its breath and waiting to see what he’d do next.

In the distance, a flash of lightning knifed down from the sky, illuminating black puddles spread across the ground for as far as he could see. Some were as large as whole swimming pools, while others looked impossibly deep, as though he could plunge a hand in to the wrist and still not feel the bottom. Seconds later, a roll of thunder followed, rumbling on and on until he thought it might never stop.

With a frown, Kylo climbed out of the TIE and, refusing to wear it any longer now that he was alone, unlatched his helmet. Once he’d taken it off, he sucked down a series of greedy gulps of air that left him feeling more alive, more  _human,_  than he’d been in years. Even after less than a minute of standing out in the open, he was already soaked through to the bone, his clothes heavy and his hair a sopping tangle plastered to his forehead. As he made to pull up his hood to shield himself from the worst of it, his gloved fingertips grazed over the slight indent of his scar.

He froze, barely allowing himself to breathe.

_Rey._

She had—without knowing, and without meaning to—led him to the point where he could choose either to take a TIE and leave Snoke, or stay and meet whatever fate came his way. He remembered then how she’d left him on the ice on Boreas, snow-crystals weighing down his eyelashes and a paralysing cold seeping into his muscles, and how she’d shone with dazzling blue saberglow and said, with all the conviction in the galaxy,  _if I kill you like this, then Han Solo died for nothing._ How she’d sat opposite him amongst the flowers in their shared meadow-dream and said  _I could have been like you_  and meant it. She knew as well as he did that there was Darkness in her, and though it scared her, it didn’t have to consume her the way he’d been taught.

It didn’t have to consume  _either_  of them.

“It’s  _her,”_ he dared whisper aloud, his voice fractured from thirst and hours of disuse. One finger was still tracing the scar’s path in absent wonder. “She opened the crack that let the Light in.”

Fat raindrops kept hammering at the crown of his head and pitter-pattering against the TIE, drowning out his every word. Kylo started at the almost musical sound of water plinking against durasteel and turned around to face the ship, jarred out of his reverie by the realisation that he’d have to get rid of it, and soon. If they hadn’t already, the First Order would be able to track it straight to Elan; no doubt they’d notice his absence and search high and low for him once Snoke— _when did I stop thinking of him as the Supreme Leader?—_ demanded his presence.

Raw fury licked at the insides of his veins, burning his blood until he could taste ash at the back of his throat. Sharp, quick breaths puffed from between his gritted teeth as he raised a hand and squeezed until the leather of his glove creaked.

He’d been so stars-damned _blind_  to every lie he’d been told; he’d even been foolish enough to keep the fake of Darth Vader’s helmet in his quarters and speak to it as though it were a confidante. Ben Organa, most importantly, had been too weak. They—Luke, his parents, Rey, Padmé, Anakin Skywalker—would try to tell him that no fourteen-year-old boy in the universe could stand a chance against Snoke’s manipulations, but if he’d just been stronger, he could have, he knew it.

_I was fourteen,_ he reminded himself, as the TIE moaned and began to crumple. He clenched his fist harder until it hurt, his skin prickling with fresh sweat.  _No—I was a baby when I felt him for the first time; he made sure to come to me when he knew I’d be too young to understand what was happening, or how to defend myself. He knew what he was doing: even if I’d been stronger, wiser, braver,_ better,  _I would always have lost._ With a metal-on-metal shriek that made his skin crawl with goosebumps, the TIE folded into a warped, unrecognisable lump, thick plumes of graphite-grey smoke curling up and out from every angle. Kylo smashed a shard of transparisteel beneath his foot, and as he fought not to cough, he thought with grim finality:  _this would have happened all the same._

A minute too late, he hissed and cursed himself. No one could follow him now, but his mouth was dune-dry, he’d packed nothing to eat or drink, and he’d gone and destroyed his only source of shelter for what looked like miles. If he’d been less impulsive, he could have combed the ship for tracking devices, then taken refuge within for the night—or for the day; Elan was too dark for him to tell. Though it was cramped inside the cockpit, he could have lolled backwards against the pilot’s headrest and been carried to sleep by the roaring of thunder and the sound of rain drumming on the roof.

If Ben Organa had been allowed to grow up and become a man, would he have been so reckless?

Kylo reached out with the Force. Several klicks away, multicoloured threads wove and swayed around each other as a cluster of close-knit heartbeats thrummed, and their slow, steady thuds couldn’t be anything other than humanoid. That meant an outpost, or—he shut his eyes, cast his vision outwards, and let himself truly  _see—_ a cantina, which meant shelter, or if Leia Organa had decided that she’d had enough of searching through the wreckage of him to find her son, a place to hire a ship to take him somewhere, anywhere else. Elan was the sort of planet one went to if they wanted to disappear: here, nobody would know his face.

While he trudged through the puddles, beads of rainwater dripping from the tip of his nose, he remembered things that he’d spent years locking away.

The last time he’d been in a cantina, he couldn’t have been much older than six. His mother had been attending a meeting in some smog-laden city where all the buildings looked like tombstones, and after ambling aimlessly through the markets, he and his father had ducked inside a ramshackle tavern to wait for her. The memory ached hollow when he let it unfurl: Han Solo had ordered a pint of syrspirit as black as tar, and he’d let him take a sip, encouraging him with a wink and a  _don’t tell your mom, kid._  Almost at once, Ben Organa had gagged and spluttered, while Han burst into peals of laughter so loud, the other patrons turned and stared. When Ben had finished downing his fizzyglug to wash away the bitter-liquorice tang, he’d laughed, too.

He hadn’t drunk any alcohol since that day. Snoke had asked it of him when he’d come to be trained, framing it so subtly, he hadn’t guessed that it had been a command, not a request. Abstaining from partaking in intimate acts and mind-altering substances would not only make him a perfect, pure vessel for the Force, but it also took great inner strength to want something and yet deny yourself of it, Snoke had said. Even if that yearned-for  _something_ was as trivial as a glass of brandy, or as big as to stumble into his mother’s outstretched arms and apologise himself hoarse.

Sheer stubbornness was the one thing keeping Kylo from shivering by the time he’d walked far enough to catch sight of the cantina at last. He’d already spent the past mile or two trying to ignore the ever-growing blister rubbing at his heel with every step, and though each footfall made him wince, he neither stopped to rest nor slowed down. He couldn’t afford it.

The cantina was a squat little cinderblock of a building, designed with no thought given to beauty, and its doorway was shoddily adorned with a fraying length of guttering neon lights, half of which had fizzled out. To get inside, somebody of his height would have to stoop. No music drifted out from within, but he strained his ears and picked up on the tail ends of a few different conversations, most of them spoken by male voices.

So far, his plan was simple. He’d mind trick the bartender and every other customer if he had to, needing to be beyond certain that none would recognise him or be able to describe him to the First Order, and then he’d figure out what to do and where to go from there.

Rey came to him before he could wrench open the door, golden and brilliant against the perpetual layer of darkness shrouding Elan. She was brighter, even, than the countless rows of white lamps in the ground, twinkling in the puddles like thousands upon thousands of submerged stars.

“We’re coming for you—me and Luke,” she said, and that alone had him tilting his chin skywards in relief and releasing a short breath that turned to vapour, his fingers slackening on the doorknob and his other hand loosening its grip on his helmet. If he were to let it fall, he didn’t trust himself not to leave it there to rust, now that he had no use for it. Rey might not have intended her next words to be audible, but they floated across the bond to him like an echo just as she pulled away: “Be safe.”

She could have been trying to say anything from  _don’t get into any trouble, Ren_ to  _I hope no harm comes to you,_ or perhaps both at once, but it hardly seemed to matter. As unwise a manoeuvre as going to the Resistance was—he’d be offering himself on a platter to a cause he didn’t believe in, and to people who would want him either dead or shoved behind bars and left to rot—somehow, his mother hadn’t given up on him, and that was more than he could have ever asked for.

Kylo sent out a silent  _thank you_  to any eavesdropping ghosts, then stepped inside the cantina. Immediately, a medley of clashing scents made his eyes sting and his lip curl: he smelled damp, worn wood; days-old caf, mixed with the alien sweetness of hard spirits; and pungent cigarra smoke, which clung to every surface.

Five minutes later found him holding a steaming mug of spiced pepper tea and sitting by a grimy window at a wonky-legged table with names, dates, and vulgar messages scratched into the wood. He’d darted his gaze about, gleaning each patron’s thoughts and motivations, but nobody had appeared interested in the hooded newcomer, however drenched he might have been. They’d all been thinking of smuggling, trading, and of draining as many cups of lum ale as possible.

Yet despite the tentative candle-flicker of hope in his heart, his blood became ice. A murky presence leached into him, snaking into his mind like climbing, choking vines, and as it spoke to him, Kylo realised how much of a fool he’d been to have that hope at all.

_Are you running from me, Kylo Ren? How long can you run for, boy?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this fic, Kylo Ren uses Form V, or [Djem So](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Form_V/Legends), just like Grandpa (and his uncle!). I've headcanoned Ben as a Form VI, or [Niman](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Form_VI/Legends) user.
> 
> Every Alderaanian child, like Leia, would have owned a [keepsake chest](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Keepsake_chest). Their parents would carve the designs on it, and they'd put treasured, sentimental items they've outgrown inside—which is why Leia hasn't put Ben's old things in there.


	5. Amaranth

To Rey, it was nothing short of oddly fitting that their ship was called the  _Starbird._

She’d grown up knowing the insignias of the Empire and the Alliance to Restore the Republic by heart. Like all scavengers, she’d seen the Republic’s crest R’iia-knew-how-many times, daubed in peeling scarlet paint on half-sunken X-Wings, and emblazoned on the decaying flight jackets and scuffed helmets of the skeletons still strapped inside. Around the storytellers’ campfires by silvery moonlight, she’d learned of Galen Marek, and how years ago, he’d sacrificed his life while attacking the Emperor. How his family’s emblem had been transformed into a symbol of hope that she’d once or twice caught herself scratching into the sands outside her downed AT-AT.

All that considered, it seemed to her like the universe had a sense of humour. The ship had been chosen for them out of a hangar packed full of others not because of its apt name, but because it was unmarked, and therefore least likely to arouse any suspicion. Within, she and Luke—the closest things the galaxy had to Jedi—would travel alone to some middle-of-nowhere planet in a system that neither of them had ever heard of, to collect a man who, like his grandfather and Marek’s master, was responsible for the downfall of the new Jedi.

In the command centre before they’d left Alinor, some of the Resistance’s higher-ups had tried their best to persuade them not to go.  _You’re the last hope we have,_ a grey-bearded major had implored, deep lines of worry creasing his forehead,  _we can’t afford to risk either of you—_ but Rey was stubborn, as was Luke. Together, she’d come across cattle less bull-headed. Luke, who was far politer than her even after years on Ahch-To with no company but his ghosts, had listened to the major, nodded in understanding, then given him a firm smile and replied simply that they  _would_  be leaving for Elan regardless.

They’d be sure to return, he’d added before slipping out the door, with or without Ben Organa in tow.

Now, Rey co-piloted, helping Luke to ease the ship through a shower of starlines as they flew through hyperspace. By her side, he was far quieter than usual; he’d spoken a mere handful of times during their twelve-hour journey, and most of them had been to offer her a cup of calming H’kak bean tea or to get her to eat a ration bar. He was as tense as thinning ice, drumming the fingers of his cybernetic hand against the dashboard controls with a persistent  _tap-tap-tap_  that reminded her of flocks of steelpeckers eating away at scrap metal. His signature in the Force was a tumult, and she didn’t need to peek into his mind to know that he was thinking of a young Ben.

Her own mental image of him felt almost real enough to touch, cobbled together from what she’d been told in Leia’s office. When she shut her eyes for a moment, he shimmered into being before her: a wide-eyed Ben Organa with his tangle of crow-black curls watched a stranger with a blaster take aim at the back of his mother’s skull, then as if by pure instinct, opened his mouth and screamed to shatter the skies.

At last, they drew near to Elan, approaching a black rock draped in a thick veil of clouds coloured the dusty grey of a sparrow’s breast. Plummeting down, Luke steered them to a smooth landing on a vast expanse of flat, inky ground, lit by seas upon seas of tiny lamps like constellations, like a thousand and one celestial archers’ belts. Rain battered against the viewport so hard, Rey could barely see past a screen of droplets as fat as her thumbnail, all racing each other down the transparisteel. Only the feeblest ribbons of sunlight chipped through the clouds to graze the ground, making it almost impossible to guess if they’d arrived during a too-dark day or an over-bright night.

If not for the fact that he’d been so panicked when he’d called to her through their bond, Rey might have thought that Kylo Ren had picked such a gloomy planet on purpose.

As soon as the  _Starbird_  came to a halt, the fine hairs on her forearms and at the back of her neck stood straight on end, as though an electric current was running along her body. Two skitter-quick heartbeats passed before a blinding-white flash of lightning struck at the horizon, and as she shielded her eyes against it and waited for a roll of thunder to follow, she glanced up to see if there were any stars. Nothing, not even the faintest hint of a moon, showed through the canopy of clouds.

Whoever lived on Elan, if anybody did, must go for months upon months without feeling the blissful warmth of the sun on their skin.

Harsh light and sharp shadows played across the planes and contours of Luke’s face as yet another bolt knifed down like a falling tree branch. “Well,” he said wryly, peering out of the viewport, “that’s a good omen.” It was perhaps the most she’d heard him say in several hours.

Deserts bred myths and legends like no other, Rey knew; in amongst the strewn sun-bleached bones and scattered ruins, they were all positively alive with stories. Luke’s Tatooine was no exception. Neither she nor Luke were particularly superstitious, but she liked his tales of how some believed that his home planet’s great Dune Sea—a desolate, inhospitable stretch of sand stifling under the glare of two suns—had once been a true ocean, and he liked hers of how, long ago, Jakku had been lush and green and  _living_ until  _something_  awful happened to render it barren and cruel.

Out of curiosity, she asked him, “What did lightning mean on Tatooine?”

“A big revelation,” Luke replied after a brief pause, powering off the  _Starbird’_ s engines with an expert’s touch. “Change or upheaval, which could be either positive or negative, depending on who you asked and when you asked them. But if you just wanted to tend to your moisture farm—” he unfastened his lapbelt, Rey mirroring him, “—it signified a sandstorm not far off, which meant that the womp rats’ nests would be wrecked. You’d always see more of them trying to swarm afterwards.”

Rey frowned, staring out of the viewport until the raindrops blurred. Jakku saw innumerable traders from just about everywhere imaginable, and each would bring their fairy-stories and old folktales with them, sometimes stopping to share them around a crackling fire. No matter how hungry she’d been, or how tired, she’d allowed herself to listen; she’d gorged on them like other, richer people might on sweet, sugary foods or wardrobes overflowing with gowns that would slip through her fingers like water.

Some out there, she’d found, believed that the stars were the galaxy’s countless dead, those who’d chosen to stay behind and hang in the sky to watch over the living. One star, always in the north, shone far brighter than the others, and each person would look upon it and think of it as a relative of theirs, or a dear friend. As expected for Jakku, fistfights had broken out over it, arguing about its identity—a cry of  _that’s my kriffing wife, you oaf_  would be met with a shout of  _like hells it is, that’s my grandmother, clear as day._ When she’d felt so alone that it had brought a real, hollow ache to her chest, when she’d let herself think for just a moment that her family might not have returned for her because they  _couldn’t,_ she’d gazed up at her north-pointing star and dared whisper:  _Mother? Father?_

And then there was the X’us’R’iia, the raging sandstorms that could force her to take shelter inside her AT-AT for days at a time. The Teedo would blame R’iia’s ever-present wrath when thunder boomed above and the sand whipped itself into a wild frenzy. Others—travellers from a planet where colourful wisps of light danced like swirling dreamsilk in the sky—claimed that thunder was the footsteps of the dead rumbling as they marched shoulder-to-shoulder in the high heavens, and that each fork of lightning was a flare, thrown down to guide the way home for the lost.

Rey had been lost once, thirsty enough to drop and with nowhere safe to ride out the storm. She’d walked in the direction of the lightning and, as if by magic, found her AT-AT waiting for her just in time.

Of course, she’d told herself later, it was nothing more than a myth—something a bored spacefarer might make up to while away an uninteresting journey, or a mother to soothe her frightened children during a squall. To even consider the possibility of it being anything  _but_  a silly story would be to let her family be dead.

Pushing those thoughts out of her mind hard enough to smash them to pieces, Rey fluttered her eyes shut and reached for the luminous silver thread braided around her littlest finger. She gave it a gentle pull and felt Kylo Ren in an instant: a flood of conflicted greys rushed into her like a stream of mercury, along with shivering tendrils of soot-black fear that made the air around him—though it felt like  _them,_ somehow; two souls ever-so-fleetingly in one body—quake with a low, staticky whine. In response to her tug, the ethereal lengths of string between them beat like birds’ wings.

“Can you feel him?”

“I think he’s nearby,” she started to say, knowing it with every ounce of her, but before she could get all the words out, lightning tore the clouds apart. As though guiding them just like in the travellers’ campfire stories, it illuminated an odd-looking shape perched in the distance, one that she didn’t recognise. “Wait—what’s that?”

Luke squinted as if to better see through the velvety curtain of darkness, then stood and dragged up his hood with both hands, understanding what it meant as well as she did. “Shall we?”

She climbed upright on a pair of stiff legs and joined him, but as the  _Starbird’_ s ramp lolled out like a large metal tongue, a bitter chill seized her about the middle, dug through to her bones with icicle fingers, and wouldn’t let go. Her eyes welled up unbidden as the wind stung at her cheeks and whipped them numb.

Halting before making his way down the ramp, his voice soft and serious, Luke told her over the hissing of the rain, “If there’s a fight, and if it comes to it, I want you to head back to this ship and fly home to Alinor.”

“Absolutely not.” Rey set her jaw and prayed that her teeth wouldn’t chatter. “I couldn’t just leave you there, Luke.”

“The galaxy would prefer to lose me than you,” he said simply, without elaborating. “And we don’t know much about your bond with Ben. Harm him, and I might harm you, too.”

Rey ignored the cold, creeping foreboding curling about her lungs and stealing away her breath. “I try not to think about that,” she muttered.

A wan half-smile tilted up Luke’s lips, as good as a  _that makes two of us._ “You’re my responsibility, Just Rey,” he replied, matter-of-fact, moving ahead of her and into the downpour. “I don’t want anything to happen to you that I could have prevented.”

They disembarked onto the lamp-lined ground; up close, the tiny lights seemed less like a field of sunken constellations and more like thousands of will-o’-the-wisps, leading them ever onwards with no end in sight. Rey’s feet splashed into a puddle that went deeper than she’d expected, all the way up to her ankles, and she was grateful for the boots that came to her mid-calf—but even so, she imagined that her legs might have frozen into blocks of ice by the time they managed to find Kylo Ren. Within seconds, the rain soaked through her cloak, hammering against her skin so violently, she was almost prepared to uncover dozens of purple splatter-shaped bruises whenever she next undressed.

Luke made a small gesture with his flesh-and-blood hand, and all of a sudden, the rain began to bounce away from the two of them. When Rey held out a damp hand of her own as if to let water pool in her upturned palm, her movements sliced a path through the torrents.

She’d never  _seen_  so much rain before, not in all her twenty years, and only the meadow-dream that she and Kylo Ren had shared had come anywhere close. But that hadn’t been  _real;_ she’d woken up warm and dry in her bed, bathed in the gauzy glow of dawn with no proof besides the sore echo of somebody else’s burn wound simmering on her neck. A wonderstruck breath caught in her throat with an audible hitch, and she scarcely noticed the strange, sad quirk of Luke’s mouth as she thought of how Rey of Jakku would have adored a storm of this magnitude.

That version of her from not so long ago would have hurried outside to put out anything that could hold liquid to catch the rainwater—earthenware bowls that she’d found buried in the dunes, scavenged glasses, flasks lifted from the pockets of dead pilots, anything that she could dig out. Once they’d filled to the brim, she’d have taken them inside her AT-AT, one by precious one, carrying them to her chest so as not to spill a single drop. There, she’d have guarded them like treasures, and she might have sipped from one, or two or three or four, while using the others to scrub her face or to rinse the sand from her hair.

It took them several more minutes of sloshing through puddles the size of lakes before they reached the lightning-lit  _thing_  that she’d seen in the distance. She didn’t realise what it was until she was almost an arm’s length away, and then it hit her with a jolt to her gut. A TIE Interceptor, one that looked as though it had been taken in a giant’s fist and crushed, over and over again, until it was beyond anybody’s repair. Shards of broken transparisteel glittered in a ring around it, what ought to have been arrow-like solar collector panels were more a set of bent lumps, and weak plumes of iron-grey smoke spiralled out of what had once been a hatch.

A frisson of shock shimmied down her spine as Kylo Ren stepped out from behind the warped mess. Before she could wonder what in R’iia’s name could have possessed him to make him destroy his own ship, she got a good look at him in the flesh for the first time since they’d duelled on Boreas.

In the lamplight, without any tricks of the Force, he was far too pale, so white, he could have been carved from salt and snow and moonrays. Heavy lilac shadows were streaked under his eyes and the healed pink slash of his scar was stark against his cheeks, drawn with a different kind of hunger to what she’d been surrounded with on Jakku. His lightsaber rested at his hip, though he made no attempt to grab it at the sight of her or his uncle, and his lower lip faltered as if he were teetering on the verge of speech but not quite mustering up the nerve.

All fell silent, and even the rain seemed to go quiet and still. Rey held her breath and felt, madly, impossibly, like Elan was doing so with her, waiting to see what would happen when Luke and Ren collided.

For what felt like hours, neither man spoke. Finally, without moving an inch, Luke softly asked, “What made you want to come back, Ben?”

“A lie,” Ren whispered, his voice craggy and brittle. He stared at them with the same haunted expression he’d worn in their meadow-dream, as though to him, they were the only two real things in the galaxy, as if they’d fade away if he dared take his gaze off them for a heartbeat. “It was all a lie,” he said, stronger now but stilted and nearly dazed, a gloved fist tightening at his side while the other clutched his mask. “Snoke was—was supposed to be wise, and I believed everything he said. He tricked me with Darth Vader’s helmet; it burned to ashes with his body on Endor, but he had a fake made to give to me. Since I was nothing more than a boy, he’d been using it to fool me into thinking that Vader approved, that he  _wanted_  what I was doing, but—” Ren scanned Luke’s face, taking in every detail, “—he doesn’t.”

The corners of Luke’s eyes crinkled, betraying what was almost, but not yet, a smile laced with subtle triumph. “You’ve spoken to him?”

Kylo Ren shook his head, dislodging his hood and flinging plump, glassy beads of rain in all directions. “No. I—he can’t reach me yet. But Padmé and my father—” his throat bobbed as he tried to swallow around the alien feel of the word, “—they can. I’d thought… I’d thought it was too late for that. For anything.”

Hazy memories of nights on Ahch-To floated towards Rey then, as delicate as silver blossoms and the sound of chiming bells. She remembered how she’d lain on her pallet in her hut and strained over the whistling wind and rushing tide to hear Luke murmuring by the cliffs. How as they’d sat eating a meal of cooked fish, she’d caught a glimpse of his ghosts for a moment, vivid enough to impress on her eyelids when she let them drift shut.

There had been two men who both felt like the dunes and what stars were made from, one with burnished fox-gold hair, the second with a cocky grin and a tempest brewing in his heart. She’d liked the look of the women the best, she recalled: the first had a gentle, sand-beaten face and worn clothes, though death ought to at least have given her the freedom to dress in finery if she pleased, and the other had been lovely like birdsong, with gowns sewn from sunrises or embroidered with the bluest lakes and rivers, and with hands as soft as water itself. Hands that, despite the niggle at the back of her mind that scowled and warned her  _impossible,_ seemed to have pulled her from a nightmare of the desert straight into Kylo Ren’s Nysa.

Luke had made sure to tell her their names and their stories, as if that alone could preserve them. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Shmi Skywalker, and Padmé Amidala, the woman Ren had mentioned. A girl-queen with no crown but the flowers in her hair, who’d watched as Emperor Palpatine seized power and liberty died around her. She hadn’t been a Force user, but with nothing but hope to keep her burning, she’d come to her grandson and tried to wrestle him from the same jaws that had clamped around her husband and sealed his fate.

Rey glanced at Luke, trying to puzzle out just how much he knew. Months ago, he’d told her that his father had given him the gift of being able to see his mother and grandmother, so had they all talked of Ren together? In her mind’s eye, she saw the five of them sat deep in conversation in the heart of the forest with falling petals from the gorsa trees for candles, the ghosts resplendent under Alinor’s moon.

Giving herself a small shake to clear her thoughts, she blurted out, “Why did you leave so suddenly? You sounded so urgent, and all I could feel was your fear.”  _I was_ not _worried for him,_ she hastened to tell herself as soon as the words had leapt from her tongue, uncertain of who she was trying to convince.  _If I was, it had nothing to do with him as a person and everything to do with what him getting hurt—or worse—might mean for our bond, and for Luke and Leia._

Ren sucked in a shuddery breath. “Do you remember our dream?” he asked her, once his shoulders had sagged with his exhale, which wafted out into the cold as a silvery puff of air. “I said that it was our way to challenge a failing Master of the Knights of Ren to a duel, often to the death, for the position. That there's no refusing once the challenge has been issued. That one of my Knights tried to defeat me and failed.” At her nod, he went on, “I was a fool not to have killed her then. Almost all of them arranged to usurp me. They’d planned to confront me in the middle of the night. Had it not been for Ha—my father warning me, they might have succeeded.”

“A duel to the death—” Luke began, his brows knit, then he cut himself off. “How were you failing them?”

A wry twitch tugged at Ren’s mouth. “Neither you nor Rey are dead.”

Had she not fought Ren before, and had he not intervened for Leia, Rey might have asked  _would you kill us now, if it meant regaining their favour?_ Yet she knew the answer; she knew it in how his reckless, powerful lightsaber swings hadn’t been aimed to hit her during the three times they’d battled, and how he’d hidden Alinor and their bond from Snoke no matter how difficult it must have been, keeping them safe the only way he could.

“That’s not to say that you haven’t had the opportunity—Rey’s already told me that you’ve known where we are this entire time.” Again, Luke almost smiled. “Alinor is very well-protected; your Knights won’t be able to find it unless they either know its co-ordinates or where to look.” Then, clasping and unclasping his hands with anxiety, as though dreading the response, he asked quietly before trailing off, “Your Knights, are they all…”

“Yours? All but one.”

Silence hung in the air, thick as a palpable entity, as if Rey could have ignited her lightsaber and cut right through it. Luke was desperate to know more, she could tell: if she were him, she’d be aching to ask who amongst those students who’d joined Kylo Ren that night on Nysa had died, and who still lived.

They’d been her fellow students, too, and she might have even childishly called a few of them her friends, but the blade-sharp soreness blooming and twisting behind her ribs cautioned her against thinking of them. When the Praxeum fell, she must have trusted some of them enough to cry out to them for help, but none had cared to listen, and though she’d been a terrified five-year-old, they’d all been willing to kill her or to let somebody else deal with her.

Each of them had treated her like they hadn’t watched her grow for two years. They’d been so quick to discard her, as though she were nothing.

Everybody except for Ben Organa.

With another gesture and what sounded like a sigh, Luke shielded Ren from the rain. For a fraction of a second, Kylo Ren peered up at the skies with something not unlike wonder written on his face, then shook his head in disbelief. “How can you be so eager to accept me back?” he demanded, his free hand balling into a fist. “So ready that you’d jump onto a ship without even a day’s notice and come to fetch me from some backwater world?”

_You saved your mother’s life,_ Rey was about to argue,  _surely that means something,_ but it was Luke who stepped forwards and spoke.

“After the Praxeum, I was furious for months and hurt for years,” he started, his voice rough. Kylo Ren darted his gaze down to Luke’s feet, all too wary of the shrinking gap between them, but he didn’t stride backwards, and instead made himself meet his uncle’s eyes. “It hurt so much, I didn’t think it would ever stop, and that I’d be carrying it with me forever. It still does, even if it’s duller than before. When you… when Han died, it felt like something in  _me_  had been ripped out, and if I felt that way for a best friend I hadn’t seen in over a decade, I can’t imagine what you must have felt for a father.”

Beside him, Rey’s heart constricted, and she had to hurry to blink away the unwelcome wetness pricking at her eyes and fogging up the world. Luke seldom talked about Han, and she’d thought better of it whenever she’d been tempted to bring him up, but perhaps she ought to have. His voice was filled with more raw grief than an ordinary human ought to be able to contain, and another pang struck her chest at how he must have been keeping it locked away inside, letting it batter him from within.

If Han Solo was truly a ghost and was eavesdropping, maybe along with Padmé Amidala, she imagined him laughing and teasing Luke:  _hey, don’t get all mushy on me, kid._

“I have to accept my part in this, too, Ben. If I’d seen the signs in front of me, or if I’d just been there on Nysa to stop it…” A spark of fresh determination set Luke’s jaw, and he continued, holding Ren’s stare, “I could _never_  hate you, or abandon you. You’ll always be Ben to me, and before you give me any of that ‘Ben Organa is dead’ nonsense, you and I both know that turning to the Dark Side, or to the Light, doesn’t destroy who you were.”

“You never used to say that.” Kylo Ren’s eyes—a dark, rich brown like his mother’s at first glance, but with hints of honey-bronze and hazel in the glow of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny cat’s-eye lamps—narrowed in suspicion. “You always encouraged me to shut out that part of myself, even when I told you that I couldn’t. You wanted me to pretend that it wasn’t there. That I was somebody else.”

“I was wrong.” Luke’s voice was firm and yet, somehow, as fragile as an eggshell; adamant with years of things that had gone unsaid, though it pained him to speak them aloud. “So wrong, I—"

“And now I suppose you’ve changed, have you?” Ren interrupted, scowling. “Seen the light?”

“How could I not have, Ben?” As Luke took another tentative step towards his nephew, Rey noticed with a little shiver of surprise that Ren didn’t glare or growl when addressed by his birth name. Instead, at the word  _Ben,_  the faintest glimmer of recognition flared in his eyes; she wanted to draw it out until he asked for it himself, until he recoiled from being called  _Kylo Ren._  “When I exiled myself to Ahch-To and meditated in the first Jedi Temple, the Force near enough grabbed me by the shoulders and made me see the right way. I should have listened to you, and I shouldn’t have tried to force you to be someone you weren’t,” Luke carried on, his eyes shining. “I’m sorry.”

Kylo Ren bared his teeth—they were white but crooked, which just made him all the more infuriatingly human—and snarled, “You love me and I deserve none of it.” He lurched back, almost pressing himself against the warped pile of durasteel and splintered mechanics that had once been a TIE Interceptor. Without Luke to bear the brunt of his bitterness, it turned itself inwards, pouring through the bond like toxic, slow-moving sludge: somebody was showing him kindness, and he was utterly lost as to what to do with it. “I’ve made murderers out of half your apprentices,” he croaked, “and I can never give back what I stole from the rest.”

“Actually,” Luke corrected him gently, “you can.”

Ren did not so much as ask  _what;_ rather, his lips shaped it, noiseless.

“In the Jedi Temple, I discovered that there’s a loophole.” Rey couldn’t see a smile on Luke’s face, but she could  _hear_  it. “Like Rey’s memories, the one who took away the Force can give it back.”

It took a while for what Luke had said to sink in, but when it did, Ren’s hands began to tremble, and he almost let his helmet crash to the ground. As he swallowed hard and accepted it, all the fight drained out of him, and his tall frame seemed to deflate. “I had a purpose and now it’s gone,” he murmured, as if to himself. “Everything was a lie.”

Before she knew what she was doing, Rey surged forwards and burst out with, “I’ll tell you what your purpose is.” Her voice startled her with its steadiness, and the instant she spoke, Ren tore his eyes away from Luke to gaze at her as though seeing her anew, his lips parted by a fingerbreadth. “You’re going to come back with us, Ben Organa, and you’re going to look your mother in the eye again, and then you’re going to show me the boy I’ve heard so much about, the boy I’ve only ever met in stories. You’re going to unlearn everything Snoke ever taught you and help us defeat him, because kriff, I of all people ought to recognise a lost childhood when I see one, and—” she had to pause to catch her breath, her lungs on fire, “—and we can’t do it without you.”

He didn’t move for a moment after she’d finished, as though she’d bewitched him. But then Luke outstretched an arm, his flesh-and-blood palm facing up for Ren to lay his own in, and offered, “Come with us?”

_You know that I can’t be who you all want me to be,_ came Ren’s voice in her head, silver, whisper-soft, and almost apologetic.

_And just who do you think we want you to be?_

_A perfect, sinless Ben,_ he replied, though his conviction wavered.  _A Ben who’ll embrace the Light at once and never falter. I can’t—I can’t be that._

Rey raised an eyebrow.  _You haven’t been paying much attention if you think that’s what we want,_ she shot back. _We want whatever you’ve got,_ she added,  _whoever you are._

Kylo Ren looked away from her, his eyes flitting over her shoulder and through the flickering sheets of rain to the  _Starbird_  sitting on the horizon. She didn’t dare breathe as he bit his lip and slowly inched forwards, walking as if he were balancing on a tightrope.

He stopped dead before he could reach Luke.

All the sparse colour bled out of his face, his features contorting in pain that skittered across the bond to reverberate in her. It was worse than the most awful heat-and-thirst headache she’d ever had to grit her teeth through on Jakku, pounding at her skull like the beat of a bass drum, enough to make her vision swim and her stomach flip and churn. One of Ren’s hands flew up to grind his knuckles against his temple in a vain attempt to alleviate it, and through his clenched teeth, he let out a strangled,  _“No.”_

 

* * *

 

Snoke seeped into him like an oil spill, enveloping him, weighing him down, and turning his limbs to lead. Every fibre of his being shrieked at him to  _run—_ but of course, there was never anywhere for him to run, not when the enemy could invade his very thoughts.

_Skywalker is lying to you,_ Snoke boomed, the ear-splitting volume of his voice ringing in his head and consuming him whole.

A blink with eyelids suddenly as heavy as anvils, and he was thrown backwards in time to his childhood, some twenty years ago. He stood on the staircase of the house with the drapes of climbing ivy in Theed, a hand frozen on the bannister and a foot hovering in mid-air, dangling between steps. His father’s mutter of  _there’s too much Vader in him, Leia_  floated from the hallway, while Snoke burrowed into his ears like the gnarled, rotting roots of an ancient tree and whispered, as if to comfort him,  _he’s afraid of you, dear child._

In the next moment, as tension that had been brewing all day finally boiled over, his parents descended from a series of petty jabs to a full-scale shouting match. Ben hugged his pillow close and listened to their anger ricocheting off the walls, and Snoke twined about him and reminded him  _this is because of you, boy; they don’t understand you, and they never will._

Then he crouched in his bedroom, surrounded by a swarm of shadows fit to leap out at him, his fingertips digging into the hollows of his knees and leaving pink marks. He couldn’t stop thinking of all the blood on Eufornis Major, how his scream had scraped his throat, and how the words _too much Vader_  had circled in his mind, over and over again, until he could have screamed once more.  _You see what you are now, don’t you?_ Snoke murmured, almost gentle.  _What you could become?_

Because he wasn’t a person, was he; he was a  _creature,_ a  _monstermonstermonster—_

_The old Jedi and the scavenger and your ghosts. They’re all lying to you, Kylo Ren._

Dark, drenched Elan and the ivy-veiled house on Naboo disappeared. When he managed to make himself look down, a pair of glowing cuffs constricted his chafed-raw wrists, and as he whipped his gaze up again, he was met with dozens of condemning faces, their eyes narrowed to hateful slits. Before he could pray that his mother wasn’t stood amongst them, something pressed at the base of his skull.

He didn’t have to whirl around to know that it was the barrel of a blaster.

_That’s all you’re going to get if you’re enough of a fool to believe the blatant lies dripping from their mouths—the death penalty._ Revulsion seared caustic in Snoke’s tone, and as he spoke, Kylo imagined his bony wrists tensing on the arms of his throne, rope ladders of protruding veins and tendons snaking up the sleeves of his robes.  _It’s all that you’ll ever be worth to them: an example to set, a cautionary tale to frighten their children, a beast to slay._

“No,” Kylo heard himself say. Through teeth so clamped together, they could spit sparks, he grated out, “No,  _you_  lied to  _me.”_

“Snoke,” Rey said from somewhere a thousand light-years away, breathless and dizzied. “Luke, it’s Snoke, I can feel it in the Force—something’s wrong—"

Phosphenes crowded and danced at the edges of the world, blacking out the corners of his vision, and everything felt too distant, as though he’d been wrenched halfway out of himself. His head burned, like it had when Ben Organa had tried to resist at first, but he couldn’t allow himself to give in, not when he’d chosen to leave. To let Snoke in now would be to doom not just Luke and Rey, but his mother, too— _and yourself,_ somebody whispered, their voice a melody, soft and sad.

_Everything I did was all for you,_ Snoke was telling him.  _I made you what you are; I took the lump of coal that was Ben Organa and crafted him into a diamond._ Kylo tried to peer through the haze at the two foggy figures in front of him, blurred in the downpour like reflections in a steamed-up mirror, and Snoke took on an almost kinder cadence. That, too, had been a lie, as had perhaps everything he’d ever said.  _Skywalker never understood you, did he? He never understood that Ben was never supposed to exist, and that there was only ever meant to be Kylo Ren. The galaxy has plans for you, boy: I, and I alone, can help you reach your true potential—_

Somebody, not him, gave a high-pitched whimper.

_(And then he was fourteen again, shooting cautious glances behind him as he walked. He stole away through the fields of flowers, all nestled within their petals for the night, to Nysa’s woodlands. By a pond so crystal-clear by moonglow, he could see every sooty eyelash and every mole dotting his reflection’s face, he crouched and watched the tiny insects crawling up the rushes, each with wings patterned like stained glass. They were luminous in the Force, the multicoloured pinpricks of light belonging to them shifting to the rhythm of their chirps._

_If he hesitated, he wouldn’t be able to do it, especially not when it counted. He chose one at random and_ pinched, _severing its connection to the Force. It was as if the smallest of stars had winked out forever, leaving behind a blank space in a constellation. The insect didn’t seem to notice—it neither knew nor cared about what he’d done—but he could no longer sense it, and to a Jedi, it might as well not exist._

_What felt like a mere mouse’s heartbeat later, rain bucketed from a sky swamped in a monochrome soup of clouds, spattering and darkening the terracotta walls. Ben was older, lanky-limbed and willowy where he’d one day become strong, and his nose stung with the acrid tang of smoke. Luke’s Praxeum blazed before him: the hungry flames licked up to the roof, and soon, if he didn’t intervene, they’d reach the archives and take Luke’s precious artefacts—some dating as far back as the Old Republic—with them. The padawans were yelling, some hopelessly fighting back, but they went out just like the insects he’d practised on, this time like entire suns._

_Yesterday, while the weight of knowing what he’d have to do crushed him, he’d called her_ Sunshine,  _and in response, she’d flung her arms about him, almost bowled him over, and demanded that he help her with her forms. Today, Rey frowned up at him, no gleam of familiarity in her eyes. She regarded him with curiosity, as though wanting to ask who he was, and he knew that if she did, it would destroy him._

_Not-quite-Ben-not-yet-Kylo bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted iron, took a deep breath and inhaled the scent of fire still clinging to his robes, then pulled the Alderaanian music box and the sunblaze meditation beads from his pockets. For good measure, he added all the credits he had—several years of birthday money from his parents, which had mostly gone unspent._

_“All of this—” he pushed Ben Organa’s most treasured possessions over to the Crolute, who almost drooled over the meditation beads in particular, “—in exchange for a home for her.” Before Plutt could make a greedy grab for his things, he went on, weaving a thread of danger into every word, “With a well-off family, the best you can find. Ensure that she always has plenty to eat and people to care for her as if she were their own.”_

_“Of course.” Unkar Plutt’s features stretched into a grin. He took Rey by her skinny bicep, dwarfing her. “Only the very best.”)_

Snoke frothed with a fury that threatened to scald them both.  _You betrayed me after all I’ve done for you,_ he roared, and then went menacingly quiet.  _I was kind to you; I offered you a choice: you were to either kill or sever the Force from every apprentice, but you were not to leave a single one unharmed._ As Snoke’s hands curled into bone-popping fists, the pain became almost blinding, making Kylo want to retch.  _You were not to let a thing as trivial as compassion command you._

Somewhere far away, a man was screaming himself hoarse. The ground was biting wet and cold on his knees and the little lamps were searing-bright in his eyes and somebody’s hands—one metal, the other warm and human—were cupping his cheeks, urging him, “Look at me. Look at me.”

_(As a boy, he remembered thinking that his father was invincible. Han Solo seemed too glib and quick for anything to ever wound him, cunning like the trickster-foxes in his mother’s fairy tales, who escaped capture by vanishing with a swirl of their bushy tails. Yet his lightsaber stabbed through his father’s chest with ease, and a callused palm came up to graze his unmarred cheek—_ how could I have expected to feel nothing,  _he thought—before the body slipped over the catwalk and into the abyss below. Before he could turn away, the ghost appeared, wearing a glare so full of loathing, Kylo wouldn’t have recognised it as his father if he hadn’t said in his gruff voice, “Look at me. Look what you’ve done.”_

_Leia Organa barely had a moment for an alarming awareness to shoot through her, to feel the blaring warning in the Force lighting up her nerves, before the Senate Building exploded and collapsed around her. Systems away, in a flower-freckled forest clearing, Luke Skywalker dropped his training lightsaber and fell to his knees, clutching at his heart. Rey lowered herself beside him, too numb to cry. Padmé Amidala, with her crown of flowers, let loose a gut-wrench of a sob, and all Anakin Skywalker could do was watch blankly as the rubble settled, then send Han Solo to take Leia by the hand._

_“Look at me, Ben,” his mother whispered, blood and dust caked into her hair.)_

With great effort, Kylo made himself look and found that Luke, and not any wrathful spectres, knelt before him. Behind Luke, the sight of Rey rattled him to the core. She hunched over with her hands fisted in her hair and her eyes screwed up, and her lips were shaking, thinned colourless as she fought not to let even a suggestion of a sound tumble past them.

_She hurts with me,_  he thought with startling clarity, though trying to do something as simple as thinking felt like he was wrangling his mind enough to be able to step back into it. _I need to block off her end of the bond, somehow, just until—_

_My boy, your lapses in loyalty will be forgiven if you do what is right and dispose of Skywalker and the scavenger girl,_ Snoke said.  _There will be no punishment beyond this lesson; if you kill them for me, Kylo Ren, I will open up my arms and receive you as my most prized apprentice once more._

There was blood on his tongue, and his lightsaber was heavy on his belt—too heavy, as though it were an anchor, dragging him further down. As he reached for it, he felt Snoke’s scarred mouth twist into a poor imitation of a smile.

Up above, the clouds drifted apart to reveal a patch of blurred silver and white stars tucked into the wispy gap between. One, impossible to miss amongst the others gathered around it, outshone the rest. Kylo squinted up at it, using it to strengthen his tenuous grip on reality as he prepared for what he was about to do, and though he knew that his mind was playing tricks on him, he could have sworn that he smelled the powdery-soft, river-fresh perfume of a lotus blossom before it faded away as quickly as it had come. Straight from a memory, his grandmother’s musical voice breezed against his ears and whispered,  _Ben, there’s always a choice. Always._

For the first time since he’d dreamed of her, he believed her.

Kylo Ren grabbed his lightsaber by the hilt—

_(Luke Skywalker, his eyes as blue as summer waters, helped an eleven-year-old Ben into the correct opening stance for Shii-Cho, then parried his first uncertain strike with an encouraging smile. “That’s it! You’re doing so well already! No, don’t give me that look—of course you can get the hang of it if you try—“)_

—pulled it from his belt—

_(Ben was awake way past lights out; it was so late, the sliver of sky that he could see out the window was an impenetrable navy-purple blanket swathed in pearlescent clouds, perfect for the crescent moon to rest atop. His thirteenth birthday had been a few days ago, but his parents were too busy to visit: they’d sent him gifts wrapped in delicate tissue paper and the scent of his mother’s ladalums, but it hadn’t been the same as their physical presence, and he was still angry enough for it to gnaw away at his insides and deny him sleep._

_In his frustration, he’d sneaked off to the archives and yanked a book from a shelf, then sat on the floor in silence apart from the rustling of turning pages, but the pitter-patter of small, bare feet on the tiles told him that Rey had found him._

_Despite himself, he flashed her a half-smile. “Bad dream, huh, Sunshine?”_

_“Yeah.” Rey plopped herself down beside him, scooted closer, and lifted up his arm to drape it over her shoulders, laying the warmth of her head against him. “I had those dreams again,” she mumbled into his sleep-shirt, trusting that he’d know which ones she’d meant without having to ask. “And I couldn’t find…” Abandoning that train of thought midway, she hiccupped and shook her head, jostling the three buns that he’d styled her hair into one morning and she’d insisted on keeping. She peered over at his book, her lips moving to test the feel of the not-yet-familiar words, and asked instead, “What are you reading about?”_

_“The Barsen’thor of the Jedi Order during the Cold War.” Using a finger to keep his place, Ben flipped to the front cover so that she could see the title, embossed in gold leaf on worn burgundy leather. “Almost four thousand years ago, this person—no one knows their gender for sure, but historians have their theories—"_

_“Is there a battle?” Rey interrupted. “Is anybody fighting?”_

_“Uh, no. Not yet.”_

_“Oh.” Rey frowned to herself before he could go on to tell her of how the Barsen’thor had defeated and redeemed a Sith Lord who’d wielded a powerful Force plague that drove countless Jedi Masters insane from across the galaxy. After all, he supposed, she was a three-year-old, and her interests went as far as eating sweet treats, picking wildflowers, splashing in muddy puddles, and hitting him with sticks and calling it sparring. “That’s boring,” she said, and rested her head back against him with a little huff of air. When a while passed and she hadn’t spoken again, Ben guessed that she’d fallen asleep at long last, and made his movements more careful so as not to wake her._

_“There you two are,” Luke said from the doorway, though Ben hadn’t heard him approach. He gave them both a soft smile as he walked in and crouched down to be at eye level with them. “It’s far too late to be awake reading, don’t you think?” he asked, then directed his gaze towards Ben, grinned, and teased, “Or were you trying to anaesthetise yourself with a tome on ancient history?”_

_“I dreamed of the fire again.” Rey swiped a fist over her eyes, her voice thick. “I was waiting for hours, but…”_

_“It’s all right,” Luke soothed, and if not for the tension smouldering underneath his skin, Ben could have believed him: his uncle had a demeanour that could effortlessly put everybody around him at ease._  You can’t be pissed at Luke,  _he’d once overheard his mother saying to his father,_ it’d be like kicking a baby pittin.  _“I have something to show you.”_

_At that, he drew a flower from the pocket of his robes. It was without a doubt the prettiest thing that Ben—and Rey, judging by how she took a sharp inhale in awe—had ever seen: it was shaped like a star, its six petals tipped the regal purple of dusk, then a rich wine-red, then burning-bright orange, and at the centre, a canary’s yellow. Luke held a flimsy petal between his fingers and ripped it down the middle, and Rey let out a surprised, sad noise to see something so beautiful ruined. A moment ticked by, and before their very eyes, magic began to work. The flower knit itself back together again, sunset-streaked filaments reaching out for their other halves, twining around them as though embracing them, then mending until the bloom sat whole and untouched on Luke’s open palm._

_“See?” Luke stroked the healed petal with a gentle fingertip. “They’re incredible plants, really: if you pick it or cut off a part, it’ll just grow what it needs straight back again, even the roots once you put it in good soil. Like you—whatever hurts you, you can recover from it in time. Everything will be all right in the end, I promise.”_

_After a tired Rey shuffled off to her bunk and Ben made to follow her to his own, where the other boys snored and snuffled, Luke halted him by placing his cybernetic hand on his shoulder. “You’re too stubborn to come and talk to me about it, but I know it must feel awful,” he said, and there was such sympathy in his voice, Ben couldn’t stand it. “I wish I had the right thing to say that’d make it feel better. But your mom and dad do love you, more than you could ever imagine.”_

_Ben scowled, the spell shattering apart around him in an instant.)_

Burying all knowledge of Alinor and the Resistance as far down inside him as it would go, determined to keep Leia Organa as safe as he possibly could no matter the cost, Kylo tightened his grip on his lightsaber—

_That’s it, my apprentice, quickly now—_

—and threw it.

It clattered to the ground only a few metres away, spinning and skidding as it landed at the edge of a puddle, but he’d made his defiance clear. Though his throat was ragged and raw, he heard himself shouting over the thunder and rain, “I’m not yours!”

_You_ are  _mine,_ Snoke snarled, clawing through each of his thoughts and scrambling for the Resistance base’s location with knifepoints for fingers.  _You’ve been mine since the day you were born, and you always will be mine._

Kylo Ren flung up walls of adamant, blocking his former master with every iota of strength still pounding through his veins. Snoke hissed in rage and began to cleave through his mind in earnest— _he means to kill me if I won’t give him what he wants,_ he recognised with a stark sense of acceptance—and then he couldn’t see either Rey or Luke at all, just an ocean of blackness that surged up and crashed over him like a shroud, towing him under.

 

* * *

 

Fizzing black spots edged ever closer, eating away at Rey’s field of view until she peered down a narrowing tunnel, until she had to squeeze her eyes shut as her head sang with the worst pain she’d ever felt. Hunger cramps after three days without a solid meal, or the time her rope had snapped inside a wreck of a Star Destroyer and she’d gone plummeting down, ripping a stinging gash from her hip to her bottom rib—those things were all pitifully minor compared to the way every neuron lit up and made her want to plead aloud for it to stop. For herself to be knocked out, because if nothing else, it’d quiet the ringing in her ears.

It hurt so much that she couldn’t speak, and could only cling to one certainty for dear life: she wouldn’t allow Snoke to have her screams. She’d keep her teeth gritted until her jaw throbbed, not letting any of the sounds that were bubbling up in her throat come pouring out, and she’d have that victory over him, at least.

_Kill them kill them kill them,_ Snoke chanted in both of their minds, and Rey realised then with an icy lurch in her gut that if Kylo Ren refused, Snoke would clench his fist and snuff him out in front of her and Luke, just like that.

When she managed to open her eyes a crack, Kylo Ren stared ahead, unseeing. His pupils had almost entirely swallowed up his irises, and he splintered the air with the most awful screams she’d ever heard. Luke looked more lost than she’d ever seen him, his hands cupping each of his nephew’s ashen cheeks as he begged him to  _look at me,_ trying to grab hold of the shifting charcoal-to-silver thread of  _Ren_  hiding somewhere within before Snoke could shove it too far down to reach. A split-second later, before either she or Luke could react, Ren seized his lightsaber in an adrenaline-fast movement that must have sapped him of all his strength and—Rey’s heart stammered to a halt—hurled it away. She whirled around to watch it skid and slow, and when she faced Ren again, a thin stream of blood trickled from his nose.

That sight was enough to make her regain her ability to form words. “He’s killing him,” she cried out, as if Luke didn’t already know. “Luke, he’s going to kill him!”  _And me; it feels like he’s going to kill me, too,_ she didn’t dare add, though whether to avoid worrying her master further or to avoid that old Jakkuvian superstition, she couldn’t tell.

In their meadow-dream, she’d told Ren that if she killed him, she’d be letting Snoke win. If Snoke killed him now, Han Solo would have died trying to save his son for nothing, Leia would never see the Ben she loved so much as a grown man, and Luke’s missing padawans would never have the chance to feel the Force in their veins again, in a far-off fantasy of a future where they were found. Her memories would be gone forever with nobody to unseal them, but even though she felt their absence as keenly as she would had she forgotten her own name, that thought seemed so trivial next to everything else.

And  _she_  couldn’t die. Not without seeing her friends again: Finn, with his smiles that could make her feel all right even when she wasn’t; Poe and his show-off antics; and the odd afternoon spent with Jessika Pava when she was planetside, tinkering with ships and talking about everything and nothing. Besides, the leaves on Alinor were tingeing a beautiful gold, the tree boughs soon to be ablaze with fiery oranges and scarlets, and she needed to live to see a full autumn, or a winter, where she’d heard that snow fell in thick flurries and the forests became heady with the spice of pine sap.

Luke sucked in a breath through his teeth. His lips set, and with obvious reluctance, he let go of Ren’s cheek with one hand. At a small wave, Ren slumped down as if the strings keeping him upright had been severed, but Luke caught him just as he collapsed, one arm held out to stop him from slamming to the ground.

The pain vanished in an instant, taking the roaring in her ears with it. All was clear and wore a clean, bright sheen of  _newness,_  and Rey could hear the rain whispering past her and plinking in the puddles, fat drops throwing themselves against the roof of the mangled TIE Interceptor. She bent double, afraid that she might bring up everything she’d eaten then and there, but all she did—all she  _could_  do—for a moment was breathe, ushering air in through her nose and out through her mouth until she decided that she might be able to move without wobbling. The hand that she pressed against her chest was shaking so violently, she imagined that it was caught up in the force of her heartbeat as it trembled against her ribcage.

Without Snoke’s presence, consuming and devoid of light, Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker were left kneeling on the soaked ground like the sole survivors of a battle, with Ren’s sweat-damp forehead leaning against Luke’s shoulder. Luke gazed beyond the ruined TIE Interceptor and at a fixed point far away, unflinching when another fork of lightning branched down to scorch the horizon—guiding them ever onwards, just like the storytellers on Jakku had said.

He turned around to face her: his expression was scrubbed-slate blank, but his eyes swam with tears, as though he felt so many emotions at once, he didn’t know what to do with all of them.

“I’m using the Force to shield him,” he said at length, his voice fracturing like a brittle bone, as if he hadn’t spoken a word in years. “Rey—could you pick up his lightsaber and his helmet? I’ll take him to the ship.”

As Rey retrieved Kylo Ren’s things from where they’d landed, weakness ebbed from her body, leaving her fingertips and toes tingling with static. Meanwhile, Luke lifted Ren up like a young child, which ought to have been impossible, or at least a great feat, given that Ren outweighed him by a good fifteen kilograms, if not more. Kylo Ren was tall and strong to begin with, and his waterlogged clothes must have made him even heavier, but somehow, Luke carried him through shimmersilk curtains of rain that parted to allow them passage, Ren’s head lolling back and exposing the vulnerable line of his white throat.

Carefully, Luke manoeuvred them through the  _Starbird’_ s hatch and strode through the ship towards a bunk, where he lowered Ren onto the bottom bed. Against the starched white sheets and crisp, unrumpled blanket, Ren was as dark as an inkblot, and Rey couldn’t help but notice that his feet dangled off the edge. If he wanted to fit, he’d have to curl himself up like a loth-cat.

Luke disappeared into the attached ‘fresher and returned a moment later holding a wet washcloth. He stooped and set to work wiping the dried blood from Ren’s nose, dabbing it away with the kind of care that one would give to a son of their own.

Most people, Rey knew, wouldn’t have thought about such an insignificant gesture for more than a second or two. But she watched, transfixed to the spot, unsure if she ought to stay or slink out to give them a semblance of privacy. Each gentle pat with the reddening cloth had her yearning more than ever for a family, enough to make her feel like an irreplaceable part of her very being was missing, as though she’d become aware of a marrow-deep emptiness lurking inside of her, somewhere bruised and sore.

She wanted a father, or maybe she wanted a mother more.

No, she corrected herself, she just wanted a  _parent._ Either would have been perfect.

A parent who’d been there for her to remember when she’d been tiny, who’d lived with her in a warm house with cosy quilts and plump pillows stuffed to bursting with featherdown, who’d cooked for her—juicy meats that made her mouth fill with water in anticipation; sugar-dusted pastries baked with flour-covered fingers and drizzled with golden honey; and piping hot soups, flavoured with salts, peppers, and spices. A parent who’d carried her to bed whenever she’d felt unwell, then tucked her in with a song or a story, or one who’d scooped her up with tender, loving arms whenever she’d wanted nothing more than to be held.

Somebody who’d adored her as much as life itself.

Rey blinked as fiercely as she could, willing herself to toss aside all thoughts of the person-sized hollowness in her chest. The more she dwelled on it, the more it would hurt.

When Luke had finished, he stood and took the washcloth back to the ‘fresher to rinse it. Afterwards, lingering at the threshold, he heaved out a sigh into the recirculated air, suddenly seeming a decade older. Both of his hands were shaking, and his shoulders hunched inwards as if to shelter himself, though it wasn’t like him to show any signs of being about to break down. He looked over at his nephew’s supine body with sadness etched into his features, misting up his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth.

“Well, all his limbs are intact, at least,” he muttered. Seeing Rey’s eyebrow quirk up in confusion, he explained, “Skywalker family curse: when a male Skywalker child is born, the galaxy flips a coin to decide—left or right?” He shook his head, but there was no smile in sight; perhaps he couldn’t summon one, not for the time being. “What were you two talking about earlier?”

“How did you know?”

“Neither of you were very subtle,” Luke replied. “You were both staring at each other with the most intent expressions on your faces. Leia and I do it sometimes—less obviously—so it wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together.”

“Oh.” Rey aimed a fleeting glance at Luke and bit the inside of her lip, thinking of how  _regretful_ Kylo Ren had sounded, as though half-expecting them to shrug, turn back, and leave him there for Snoke to destroy. “He said—he said he couldn’t be who we wanted him to be, as if we’d come all this way to set ourselves up for disappointment,” she told him. “He thought we were hoping that he’d return as this… pure paragon of the Light Side, or something.”

Luke gave a small, tired huff. “I don’t know about you, but Leia would have taken him any way he came, as long as he was with us.” He smiled wistfully, his gaze tracing over the slopes and planes of Ren’s unconscious form as though trying to memorise the shape of him once more. “I’m going to see if I can contact her.” As he made to exit the bunk, he lightly touched her wrist, where a band of goosebumps pebbled before the sopping sleeve of her cloak, and said, “You’re  _freezing,_ Rey. Go and brew yourself some tea, or you’ll catch your death of cold after we’ve just managed to keep you around.”

He left for the cockpit, and then Rey was alone with Kylo Ren, the soles of her boots rooted to the floor. She was in two minds: half of her wanted to follow Luke, and the other half was almost tempted to squint at Ren stretched out on the bed with his too-big feet poking off the edge, trying to snatch a glimpse of the boy who’d been her friend somewhere in his large ears and the moles scattered about his cheeks and jaw like miniature stars.

The permanent frown of a man who hadn’t known the feeling of joy in years had vanished, and without it, he appeared younger and—she hesitated to let herself think it— _softer._  His hair was a soaked raven-black tangle spread out over the pillow like a storm cloud, his lashes were spiked into points, and in the artificial light, his skin was pale enough for her to map out the spiderwebs of mauve veins in his eyelids. If not for the scar that she’d given him, he could have been any trader she could have come across on Jakku, descending in a clean ship with a lifetime’s worth of stories lying dormant in his head.

Sometimes, she worried that Ren’s death, if it happened, would mean hers, too. If they were so entwined that, through whatever magic that made up the Force, neither would be able to survive without the other.

Rey could feel each of his heartbeats through the bond, making the gossamer threads between them quiver. They were steady and sleep-slow, and for reasons unknown even to her, she listened to their echo until she’d counted a full hundred, wondering if her own life was linked up in them.

“I don’t hate you,” she whispered, as she heard Luke talking on the ship’s comm unit, too quiet for her to discern individual words. She was telling him what they’d both already known for some time, but somehow, it felt raw and open, like a secret confession.

A bit over a year ago, she’d found a crashed Ghtroc 690 freighter in the Badlands, and she’d tried to fix it up to sell. Two other scavengers had helped her to repair it to spaceworthiness, reckoning that it would fetch no fewer than ten thousand portions, but they’d stolen it and used it to flee the planet while she’d bargained with Unkar Plutt. She hadn’t hated them for it; if anything, she’d been furious with  _herself_  for wanting to trust them. _I ought to have known what would come of it in the desert,_  she’d told herself, too wound up to cry. She hadn’t even hated the bandits who’d robbed her of her pickings until she’d learned how to jab an attacker in the throat or strike them with her quarterstaff: like her, they’d been hungry, and an empty belly could make a thief out of anyone.

Being cheated and robbed as she had wasn’t uncommon—in fact, it was to be expected—so scavengers kept each other at arm’s length. Everybody was a potential threat, and nobody could afford to see them any other way. When most dune-dwellers lowered their guards, there were usually little rituals and traditions associated with it, and while Rey hadn’t experienced them herself, she’d heard enough gossip around the campfires to have a rough idea.

For instance, if you wanted to show somebody that you trusted them completely, you’d offer them a sip from your water canteen, which said something akin to  _I’m entrusting you with two of the most precious things I have._ It seemed foolish to love in such a lawless place, but some did nonetheless, and the most romantic courting gesture possible was to bring food to the object of your affection, or share your own. As she’d sat by the fire, finding patterns in the flickering ribbons of flame, excited voices had sailed over to her— _I can’t believe she gave you a whole portion_  and  _do you think a roasted bloggin thigh and a bowl of spinebarrel sap soup is too much for somebody you’ve known for five months_  and  _I tried to refuse, honest, but he just about insisted I eat three-quarters of his veg-meat._

If one scavenger wanted to team up with another, they’d have to ease into it, as though it were the galaxy’s most delicate dance. They’d perhaps start by plundering the same wreck, ignoring the salvage that the other had their eye on, and once both had gauged that neither posed a threat, they might enter into a tentative alliance.

She was out of the desert now, and nobody was going to take what was hers. Civilians, soldiers, and staff alike around the base had all grown up without the basic rule of  _finders keepers, losers weepers._  If they wanted something, they’d ask, and then they’d return it, which still felt alien.

Even so, she supposed that if she had to, she could work alongside Kylo Ren.

Furrowing her brows at him as if to decipher him, Rey admitted in an undertone, “I did at first. Hate you, that is.” With Ren asleep, she was safe to say whatever she liked, to release the weight of her words from where she’d been keeping them close to her chest. “You had everything I didn’t, everything I’ve watched other people have without realising how lucky they are, and you were so… so eager to throw it away.” Her fists balled at her sides, her scruffy nails digging grooves into her palms. “I didn’t understand how anybody could do that, especially to Han, Leia, and Luke. Even I could see how much they loved you, and I’ve never known—” she forced herself to continue despite the lump in her throat, “—I’ve never known what it’s like to be loved. So, while I don’t hate you, I  _am_  angry at you, for Jakku and the Praxeum and for Han, and I think—I think that’s what I  _should_ be. For now, anyway.”

One day, she might grow to tolerate him and become accustomed to seeing him striding through the corridors of the base, or standing opposite her to spar. Maybe, in the future, she’d get to watch his mouth stretch into a grin, showing off those crooked teeth, and he’d get to hear her laugh.

“Thank you for doing what you did for Leia,” she told him, with all the sincerity that she had in her. “I… I saw a little of what was happening in your mind, earlier. You protected us, even though you had to have known that Snoke would try to kill you for it.” A moment passed, and she said again, soft enough to be almost drowned out by the rain drumming against the ship’s roof, “Thank you.”

Rey withdrew, making to go and brew the tea that Luke had suggested and join him in the cockpit.

She managed one step before the world turned upside down.

_(Lace-winged dragonflies zipped past her and skimmed above the lake’s glassy surface. Careful not to fall in, Rey leaned forwards to see her reflection: she had a child’s round, freckled cheeks and a smudge of dirt on her nose, and she wore the tunic of a Jedi, though the knees of her leggings were stained green with grass. Ben sat in companionable silence beside her, an absent-minded finger toying with the leaves of a plant that wept over the shore, and on impulse, she dipped her hand into the still water and splashed him._

_His mouth dropped open in mock outrage, then he used the Force to whip up a jet of water and send it straight at her, smiling when she swept locks of wet hair away from her forehead and burst into peals of delighted giggles so loud, they startled a flock of birds pecking berries from a nearby bush._

_Then Ben was gone, and so was the calm, cool lake and its birds and dragonflies. Frantic, Rey shielded her eyes from the rain and darted her gaze around, confused and frightened and just wanting Ben, or Master Luke—but he was off-planet, and by the time he got to her, it’d be too late. Smoke peeled from the Praxeum’s walls, puffing out like the breath of a dragon from one of Ben’s fairy tales, and heat licked at her skin with fiery tongues as she ran._

_A black-clad figure came out of nowhere and seized her by the arm, the brute strength in their grip yanking her backwards and jarring her bones. Undeterred by her biting, scratching, squealing, and clawing, they yelled, “What do we do with this one?” Every kick and punch made the hand around her squeeze tighter; Rey could already feel the bruises blooming. “She’s a_ youngling.  _What use would the Supreme Leader have for such a scrawny little thing?”_

_One of the eldest padawans—Rey remembered her name, hazy like a dream; she’d been Nyla then—eyed her._ Tell him, _she wanted to shout,_ tell him to let me go!  _Nyla considered her for a second, then said with indifference, “Ben can’t take the Force from her; none of us have the time to find somewhere to put a five-year-old. It’s best if we just kill her.”_

_Rey struggled harder against the stranger’s hold, wishing that she was a storybook character who could turn as slippery as a fish and wriggle away. Nyla had always been nice to her—all the others had—so why did she want her dead? What had she done wrong, other than be five?_

_Ben,_ her _Ben, emerged from the smoke. “No,” he blurted out, not meeting her eyes. “No, it’s all right. I’ll take care of it.”_

_But before Ben could reach her, the Praxeum melted away, and in its place were yet more flames as high as houses and the scents of blaster fire and sea-salt. In the distance, the chiming of bells rang over the sounds of wood popping and crackling, and she was running until she thought her lungs might give out and until—)_

—until she tumbled out of her vision and landed on the floor with a spine-shaking _thump,_ an ache like a voiceless cry stuck in her throat. She hazarded a wary inhale, but she could no longer smell burning or the sea, just her own damp hair, the ozone of ground after rain, and the faintest note of starship fuel humming around her.

From the cockpit, Luke called, “Rey? Are you okay?”

_What did I just see?_

Breathing rapidly and scrabbling for purchase until she could get herself to stand, Rey scanned the room. Her immediate instinct was to suspect Kylo Ren of doing  _something_  to her, but he hadn’t moved; he only let out an oblivious, drowsy snuffle in his sleep, his eyelids shifting as he explored his dreams.

She started to speak, but stopped herself mid-word, realising at once how weak and _scared_  she’d sound. Gooseflesh had risen anew on her forearms, the hairs at the back of her neck prickled, and she was overcome with a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill of her wet clothes. Needing to get away, to shove the images of flames and masked men out of her mind, she hurried to the cockpit, where she plastered on a fake smile that must have looked more like a grimace and at last got out an unconvincing, “I’m fine.” Before Luke could press further, she inclined her head towards Ren’s bunk. “So, what happens next?”

“I don’t know.” Luke frowned and turned to watch out of the viewport, where a slash of lightning branded the horizon. Something in his gaze was faraway— _unsettled,_ Rey thought. “We don’t know the extent of Snoke’s influence over him, for one; I can’t even begin to imagine the lies he’s been fed for the past almost thirty years,” he added, his voice tight. The air around him vibrated as though charged with electricity, and Rey had the curious feeling that if she were to touch him, she’d get a static shock. “We don’t… we don’t have a clue what kind of person he is now, or whether he takes after Han or Leia. All we  _do_  know is that we have to defeat Snoke.” He looked at her then, his face too pale, and finished quietly, “I can’t risk another child going through the same thing.”

“None of us can.” Rey paused, then steeled herself and made herself ask the question that had been a lead-weight on her mind since Ahch-To. “It could—it could have been me, couldn’t it? If he’d wanted me?”

“I can’t answer that,” Luke said, with a shake of his head. “All I can say is that it  _wasn’t_  you, Rey.”

“But it  _could_  have been, couldn’t it?”

During the journey to Elan, while she’d watched, entranced, as they steered through cascades of star-showers, she’d caught herself thinking about Ben Organa. She’d mulled over a young boy with wide, dark eyes and an appetite for books, and decided that power for its own sake wouldn’t have pushed him over the edge. Based on what Leia had told her, he’d have been too afraid of himself and the mistrustful whispers that would doubtless have followed him, the grandchild of Darth Vader.

No, Snoke must have promised him the very things that would have persuaded  _her_  to fall, had he chosen her instead: acceptance, love, and a place to belong.

If Ben—a boy whose own father, and perhaps mother, too, had seen Vader’s shadow casting itself over him; who’d accidentally lashed out and almost killed a would-be assassin, not understanding what he was capable of; and who’d been so terrified of the power coursing through him that he’d refused to speak for two days—had received such an offer, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Luke gave her a weary smile. “Don’t dwell on the what-ifs,” he replied, clasping his hands in his lap. He flexed the cybernetic one, studying the wires that peeked out from between the joints, and as she was about to abandon hope of him continuing, went on, “If I tell you ‘yes’, it won’t do you any good; you’ll end up thinking back to when he spoke to you on Starkiller Base, and you’ll doubt everything you are. He  _wants_  that, Rey.” Moving to manipulate the dashboard controls, he coaxed the  _Starbird’_ s engines to life with a steady, comforting thrum. “Just know that he didn’t get you, and he won’t get to keep Ben back there, either.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Trust me, I’ve thought about it far too often myself.” With the ship making a rumbling purr, juddering as it prepared to soar, Luke faced her properly. At once, concern clouded his eyes: Rey reckoned that she must look like she’d been wrung out, her hair a mess from when she’d been so blinded by pain, she’d grabbed at it and  _pulled._ “Why don’t you get some rest while I take us home?” he suggested. “I’ll be fine flying on my own.”

A warm thrill glowed in her belly at the word  _home,_  though it was nowhere near enough for her to forget her vision and the panic of having to flee, first from the Praxeum under siege, then amidst the flames from a danger that she didn’t remember. Sensing that they both needed time to be alone with their thoughts, Rey shot him a nod and made her way to another bunk on the opposite side of the ship.

She only realised how truly exhausted she was when she sagged onto the bed and tried to shuck off her boots with fumbling hands that didn’t want to co-operate. Forsaking her attempts to peel away her sodden socks, she sent a hot gust of the Force over her body to dry herself, then shuffled under the blanket, curling up in a tight ball as she had when she’d been smaller and lonelier. As her heavy eyelids drifted further down, smoke stung and smouldered in her nose, and before she could bolt upright with a wordless exclamation, she almost sighed aloud as cool water lapped at her ankles like a balm.

In the neither-here-nor-there vagueness before sleep rose up to claim her, she thought she heard voices, though they weren’t Ren’s or Luke’s. A little girl’s laughter bounced off the walls—whoever she was, she laughed as though she had the sun and the stars themselves set out for her on a plate, as carefree as if the entire galaxy was hers. Somebody, a smile in their tone, called a name that sounded similar to hers but wasn’t; it had too many softly-spoken syllables on each side to be plain, simple  _Rey._ It  _couldn’t_  have been hers: she refused to entertain the idea that she might not remember her own  _name,_  as well as her parents, her homeworld, and why she had nothing of them but silver blossoms and bells.

The name made her think of bright things: gold sparkling on the ocean; gilt-edged leaves before the sunset; fields sprawling with yellow-gold flowers; and all the colours of the dawn. Rey fought to cling to it, to drag it closer and inspect it, but it slipped through her fingers like sunlight.

And then a voice whispered to her, as though from a memory.

_My seaflower,_  it said, as she began to dream.  _My sunlight, my star-child._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: the Great Organa Reunion.
> 
> [Galen Marek](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galen_Marek), also known as 'Starkiller'—the player-controlled character of the game _The Force Unleashed_ —was Darth Vader's secret apprentice, and the [Alliance Starbird](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Alliance_Starbird) was based on his family's crest.
> 
> The title of [Barsen'thor](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Barsen%27thor) comes from the game _Star Wars: The Old Republic_ and means "Warden of the Order" in Cerean. It was only ever granted to three Jedi, and Ben is referring to the third.
> 
> Rey's [Ghtroc 690 incident](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rey%27s_690_light_freighter) takes place in _Before the Awakening_.


	6. Mirrorbright

In the bunk of the  _Starbird_  as they flew through space, Rey dreamed.

She dreamed that she was younger, though she couldn’t tell precisely how old; small enough to be scooped up like a featherweight and seated in somebody’s lap, or carried to bed when she was too tired to walk herself. There, she felt warm and drowsy and safer than she’d ever been, as though she were being held close like a treasure, the way she’d spent hundreds of daydreams imagining how a mother might, or a father. All around her smelled like a  _home—_ not a crude imitation of a shelter like her toppled AT-AT, nor her windswept stone hut on Ahch-To or her quarters on Alinor, but an actual home that was undeniably  _hers._

At first, all that she could make out was the inviting scent of fresh-baked pastries stuffed with both sweet and savoury fillings, until she became aware of more: the smoke of a log fire; a medley of delicate blossoms and fat, summer-ripe berries; and the salt-air of the sea. If she listened, she could hear windchimes tinkling in a gentle breeze, the shimmery sound of tiny bells, the croaky calls of a dozen seabirds circling overhead, and the distant ocean whispering  _hush, hush_  against the shore.

“Tell me a story,” she pleaded in her child’s voice.

There was the briefest of pauses, no lengthier than an outbreath, before a woman began softly, “Once upon a time, there were two little wolf cubs who lived up in the mountains.” Her voice was so familiar that Rey ached to place it, but could find no time in her life that it belonged to, as if she’d been keeping it locked away in some hidden part of herself, too deep down to reach. “Everywhere they looked, they were surrounded by sparkling white ice like sugar crystals and lush green forests thick enough to get lost in after a mere few paces.”

Content to let the words wrap around her and spin vivid images in her mind, Rey settled down in what she guessed were the storyteller’s arms—they felt slender but wiry and strong, much like her own. She knew how it went in the old tales: to question anything here would be to break the spell holding it together, and she didn’t want to have to leave, not yet.

“One day,” the storyteller continued, “the wolf cubs decided that they wanted nothing more than to climb the highest mountain of all: the one so tall, its proud snow-capped peak vanished up into the clouds, where it could see the sun, the moon, and every last twinkling star. And so they did, after days upon days of hard work. Though their legs felt as though they might give out, they climbed so high, they climbed all the way up into the sky.” Whoever she was, the speaker had no need of a storybook; by some magic that Rey had seen only a handful of times around Jakku’s campfires, she brought the words and wolves and mountains to life with such ease, it was as if she knew the tale by heart. “Rather than chasing unlucky ash-rabbits and deer, they could now chase the sun and the moon. But while the first wolf, finding the sun’s glare too blinding-bright for him, wanted to play amongst the stars at night, the second preferred to sleep under the glow of starlight and dance amongst the clouds during the day.”

Rey frowned. “What did they do?”

“Well, for a time, which could have been anywhere between a blink and a century for us, they argued over where they ought to stay, and at that point, their coats had started to change,” came the answer. “The night-wolf’s pale fur darkened to the black of the deepest hollow of a tree, and the constellations themselves, grateful for their visitor, were mirrored in his coat. The day-wolf, however, was not jealous, for the sun had warmed her grey-brown fur until it resembled a golden fawn’s, and braided thousands of its own beams of light into her coat. And so it became clear: one was of the sun and the day, and the other of the moon and the night, and that ended their quarrel, leaving each free to frolic wherever they pleased.”

“Don’t they ever get lonely, being on opposite sides like that and never getting to see each other?” Rey asked, her tone sleep-thickened and taut with worry. The story had her enchanted—even if something in her thought that she might have heard it before, perhaps in another lifetime—but it gave her a curious pang to think that the two wolf cubs had grown up together and were now forever separated. “Do they not ever meet in between?”

The storyteller let out a good-natured laugh. “Oh, my silly star-child,” she said, with what sounded like a smile, smoothing the hair at the crown of Rey’s head, “they’re  _never_  lonely, not ever.” Once she’d felt Rey relaxing against her, reassured, she went on, “They  _do_  see each other: every day and every night at dawn and dusk, when all is lilac, gold, and silver, when the moon and the sun are both spreading their fingertips across the land, the wolf cubs meet, and there, they’re happy to play until the end of time.”

“Can I see them?”

After a short pause, where she considered the question for a moment as if to give it proper gravity, the storyteller replied, “You know, I don’t see why not. Why don’t we wait for a clear dusk, and then we’ll look up at the sky and see if we can’t make out a wolf or two? And if not, if they’re hiding—” here, she gave Rey’s ears a playful tweak, “—maybe we’ve already heard them howling, along with the rest of their kin high up in the mountains.”

Nodding and murmuring a satisfied  _okay,_ Rey felt cosier than she’d ever thought possible, secure in a calm world of crisp ocean breezes and sweet-scented blossoms. She let her eyelids flutter shut and imagined two little wolf cubs meeting in the pearl-grey glow between day and night as the sun rose or sank, lit up in the light of the sun and the moon both, their long fur coats spangled silver with flecks of stardust or with each strand of hair limned glimmering gold with sunrays. More than anything, she wanted to stay in this homelike not-her-home, to ask to be told more strangely familiar fairy-stories from somebody who did their best to make them feel real for her—

—and then she woke up.

For a few hazy seconds, as though consciousness was a rivulet of cold water trickling down her body, all was rosy, slumber-snug and safe, until the droning hum of the ship’s engines filled her ears. Rey shifted, propping herself up on an elbow: the mattress was uncomfortable beneath her, pressing into the bones of her knees, hips, and ribs, and the world itself didn’t fit her right. Blinking against the sear of the artificial light, she tried to cling to the dream with a kind of near desperation, yearning for the salt-spray of the ocean and the woman’s soft voice. None of it came back to her, not even when she screwed her eyes shut tight enough to see firing shapes and demanded sleep.

The more the dream slipped away, the more a space inside her chest felt like it had been pierced and was emptying. Rey blew out a sigh from between her teeth and made herself sit up, hunching over herself as if to protect what still remained in her heart. She wouldn’t cry—not because of the constant threat of dehydration like on Jakku, but because allowing herself to do so would mean admitting that there was a reason to. That she’d once known the woman, the wolves, and the stories. That she’d lost them, and that she might never get them back.

When she tested her limbs to be sure that she’d regained all her strength, they were heavy not from having just awoken, but with a muscle-deep sadness that she wouldn’t have been able to explain if she’d tried. She dug out a ration bar and ate it in four big bites, but it tasted like ashes in her mouth, and after throwing the wrapper down the garbage chute with more force than necessary, Rey gave up, put on her now-dry boots, and went to find Luke.

She crept into the cockpit on feet accustomed to noiseless padding through the dunes. Luke sat with his back to her, staring out the viewport at a torrent of starlines that shuddered as he guided the  _Starbird_  out of hyperspace, then morphed into a field of luminous pinpricks and colourful wisps of dream-spun nebulae.

In that instant, hovering behind him, she decided that she wouldn’t tell him about either her vision or her dream just yet, even if she’d confided in him about the others, haltingly describing the fleeting glimpses of floating silver petals and the faraway echoes of ringing bells. Luke had, in return, confessed that he’d invented stories of  _his_ parents when he’d been young, fancying his father as a daring spacefarer and his mother as a rich, gentle woman in jewel-bright gowns, but this felt private, like a secret that had been entrusted to her. She’d keep it to herself for a while, at least until it felt as though the unsaid words would burn a hole in her tongue unless she set them free.

Rey slid into the co-pilot’s seat next to Luke. He didn’t so much as flinch, as if he’d known that she’d been there without needing to hear her footsteps. “You let me sleep through the entire journey?”

“Of course,” Luke replied. He faced her with a brief smile, then whipped back around to the dashboard controls as Alinor loomed up in the viewport, a mossy green orb wreathed in a web of downy clouds. His mane of greying hair was shaggier than ever, and there were bags of exhaustion weighing underneath his eyes. “You went through a lot back on Elan, you know,” he added, with real concern, but she didn’t need to be reminded. She’d never be able to forget that pain, and how it had clawed at the inside of her skull until she’d thought it might cleave her apart, and how that possibility had seemed almost like a mercy compared to the very idea of enduring it for a minute longer. “I thought you wouldn’t be missing all that much if you slept for an hour or twelve.”

She and Luke were alone in the cockpit, and through the bond, Kylo Ren was—for once—at peace, his emotions scarcely a ripple. His heartbeat drummed a steady, slow rhythm beside her own, as though she’d feel both fluttering against her fingertips if she laid her palm on her chest, and for some reason, the thought of his pulse always chasing hers soothed her beyond measure.  _Alive,_ each thud said,  _both alive._ “Is Ren—” With a cough, Rey hurried to correct herself, asking instead, “Is Ben still asleep, then?”

Luke didn’t respond for a moment or two. From what she could see of his profile, his brows were pinched. “I figured it might be for the best,” he said softly, his voice strange and riddled with fault lines, “if I let him stay that way until we can get him inside.” Unbidden,  _this is probably the most sleep he’s managed to get in years_ drifted from him as he pressed his lips together and lapsed into a troubled silence.

Something within her—a tiny, insistent whisper from that ethereal silvery thread looped around her—told her that he wasn’t wrong. Perhaps Luke hadn’t intended for her to overhear it, being as weary as he was, but all the same, her shoulders pulled inwards in self-reproach.  _He should stay like that so that we don’t have to drag him off the ship, kicking and screaming,_ she’d caught herself thinking, frowning, but then she’d stopped herself halfway. After all, Kylo Ren had made the decision to come home himself. To escape to some gloomy middle-of-nowhere planet and wait for them, and to refuse to kill them, even when ending their lives would have meant earning Snoke’s forgiveness.

Ren had been prepared, she realised, to die for Luke and Leia. Then, with an odd little shiver, it dawned on her: not only for them, but also for  _her._ And when Luke had said  _if there’s a fight, and if it comes to it, I want you to head back to this ship and fly home to Alinor,_ he’d been ready to  _allow_ Ren to kill him, because for him, the alternative—striking his nephew down and maybe causing her death, too—would have been too awful to bear.

 _No,_ Rey amended, her unease an anvil in her stomach.  _So that anybody who knows who he is won’t be tempted to attack him._

As they plunged past Alinor’s feathery coverlet of clouds, Rey still felt unlike herself, as though she’d lost a piece of something vital in between sleeping and waking, a piece as essential as any organ. Her awareness of it was like a new bruise that ached each time she grazed against it, and with her nerves tense enough to snap, she picked at her already blunt fingernails until they were more ragged than they’d been in weeks. Luke was elsewhere, mired in his own mind and operating on muscle memory as he flew, but he kept stealing glances at her out of the corner of his eye: he’d noticed that something about her was off, but couldn’t pinpoint what.

He said nothing, knowing that she’d come to him if she wanted to talk, and she remained quiet while he used the ship’s comm unit to request that a team of medical personnel greet them upon their arrival.

Ribbons of late afternoon sunlight the colour of raw honey shone in her eyes and filtered through the leaves in creamy golden streams, then were snuffed out by durasteel walls and the sight of countless other ships in bays as the  _Starbird_ glided into the hangar.  _I couldn’t ever be the night-wolf from that story,_ Rey thought to herself, unlatching her lapbelt. Like the night-wolf, she loved to look up at the stars and string them into her own constellations, but she’d found herself wishing for the warmth of the sun on her skin after being on Elan, where aside from the frailest of sunbeams and the thousands of cat’s-eye lamps glowing and dancing in the puddles, there was no light at all.

A small crowd had assembled before them, and an unexpected smile curved up her lips to see Finn and Poe, who were flanked by a group of medics. At the front, dwarfed by the others, stood Leia Organa. Even from a distance, Rey could tell that Leia had been careful to school her expression unreadable, determined to present herself as a general, not Kylo Ren’s—Ben’s?—mother, but there were flaws in her façade, plain to anybody searching for them. Chin tilted up as though daring herself to cry, she held her shoulders too straight and her spine too rigid, as if she were rooting herself to the spot so that she wouldn’t come running up to them.

Luke vanished into Ren’s bunk when they drew to a halt, emerging carrying him in his arms as he had on Elan. He bore him all the way down the ramp, only relinquishing him to lay him on a hover-stretcher. With his inky, rain-tangled hair and dark robes, his pale cheeks, and the faded pink slash of his scar, Ren looked like a night-wolf in the daytime, asleep under the glare of the sun that would surely hurt his eyes if he were to crack them open.

 _Just an old tale,_ Rey chided herself—but then, why did it seem so fitting that when the Force called out for balance, her dreams showed her two fairy-story characters who found their forever not in the day or the night, but in the silver, gold, and grey between?

If Kylo Ren had imagined his return while he’d awaited them on Elan, it couldn’t have been anything like this. She wondered if he’d pictured himself stumbling and crashing to his knees before his mother, or staring, hard-eyed and battle-steeled, at the petite form of a stranger. If he’d seen himself snarling and growling  _my name is Kylo Ren,_ or taking a deep breath and imploring  _please, call me Ben._  And when Leia had sent him away to train with Luke after Eufornis Major, what had she envisioned for years in the future? Her son, tall and proud and knighted as a Jedi, wielding a lightsaber that would remind her not of Darth Vader towering over her, but of her brave, good-hearted brother?

Gazing at Ren once more, Rey saw nothing but Han and Leia and a whole universe of what-should-have-beens written on his face, hidden in every feature from his aquiline nose to his full mouth. Biting her lip against the memory of Han’s body falling from the catwalk, she followed Luke down the ramp.

“Rey!”

Finn and Poe jogged up to her the moment her feet touched solid ground, letting loose a dozen breathless questions— _what the hells happened are you all right was there a fight are you hurt?_

“I’m fine,” Rey lied. She summoned a smile for them, a hairsbreadth from flinging her arms about each of their necks and staying there until she had to be hauled away. “None of us are hurt, I don’t think, just drained. Snoke wasn’t exactly ready to give him—” she jerked her head in Ren’s direction, “—up without any trouble, but we managed to fend him off. For now, at least; Luke’s shielding him. Shielding  _us.”_

Poe pursed his lips and exhaled at length, shaking his head. “Finn was awake all damned night worrying about you,” he said, clapping Finn on the back and ignoring his mutter of  _like you’re one to talk._ “You might have to take him with you, next time you and Luke decide to go on a crazy rescue mission to some backwater rock.”

“Hopefully, there won’t  _need_  to be a ‘next time’.” Finn took a step back, considered her with a sceptical twist of his mouth, and then pulled off his stitched-up jacket. “I just… know what they’re like, is all,” he added in a low voice, draping the jacket about her shoulders. “You sure you’re okay?”

The jacket was made for a Poe-sized person, or even a Finn-sized person, so it almost drowned her, strong as she was. Rey paid its largeness no notice, tugging it close around her for comfort, revelling in the warmth that enveloped her. Without realising what she was doing at first, she ducked her chin to the collar and breathed it in: though it didn’t smell like the blossoms and the sea air she craved, it calmed her with Finn’s clean, fresh scent, mixed with the tang of spiced aftershave and starship fuel that always clung to Poe.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Rey replied, her tone nowhere near convincing.

“Well, we’re here for you if you need it,” Finn said, a shadow of doubt casting itself over his face. “We’re not Force-sensitive, but we’re your friends, and that’s even better, right?”

At that, she let them encircle her in a hug. She clutched them both as tightly as she could, trying to distract herself from the heaviness in her chest that weighed her down with a yawning sense of  _loss_  that she couldn’t quite comprehend, as though she were missing something that she didn’t remember if she’d ever known.  _Poe wouldn’t be able to understand,_ she thought as they let go and started walking towards the base; he’d grown up knowing for certain that he was Poe from Yavin IV and that his parents were Kes Dameron and Shara Bey, but Finn—Finn who hadn’t had his own name until six months ago—would, and so perhaps she could explain everything to him.

On Ahch-To, Luke had told her that she’d had no memories of her life before the Praxeum. She’d been desperate for him to give her something concrete, but all he could say was that she’d had recurring nightmares of smoke and fire, and that a woman had brought her to him, pleading with him to take her in despite her age. More than mere words could describe, she’d wanted actual  _answers,_ but she’d just been left with yet more questions, which had only doubled in number after her dream.

Had she dreamed of her mother holding her and telling her fairy-stories of wolf cubs cloaked in stars and sunrays, or had it all been a fantasy that had simply  _felt_  as though it were real? A part of her needed it to have been real: imagining where she might have come from had kept her going on Jakku, and often, she’d propped herself up against her AT-AT and watched the moon rise, conjuring up homes on planets brimming with vast, roaring seas and endless flower-peppered woodlands. With a surge of awe, she wondered if she’d been born on an ocean world, like those she’d daydreamed up.

Rey tucked that thought close to her heart like a talisman, thinking of a quiet place by the seaside; of a home heated with a crackling log fire; and of a parent—or two—who’d called her their  _star-child,_  or maybe  _that_  name, the one like golden things and the dawn.

 

* * *

 

The last time he’d been permitted to sleep so long, he’d still been calling himself  _Ben._

Kylo Ren awoke slowly to begin with, murky not-quite-nightmares of flames and frightened hazel eyes lit by fireglow clinging to his lashes, then all at once, his heart mimicking a trapped bird’s frantic wingbeats against the cage of his ribs. His own eyes flew open, his fists automatically clenching until a jolt of pain shot through his knuckles, and with a lurch, he registered the harsh brightness flooding his field of view. He wasn’t cuffed and chained in some dim Resistance dungeon, where sunlight dripped through a slit of a window in grimy chinks. Nor was he on Dromund Kaas, crumpled on the cold stone ground with Snoke peering down at him from his throne, an eerie, dangerous calm eddying about him like a bated breath.

Panting, his chest heaving, Kylo bolted upright into a sitting position, blindly throwing a weight off his body as though it were red-hot. Scarcely able to take in any details with how fast his mind was racing, he scanned the room he’d been placed in: they’d put him on a cot in a clean white cell, a woollen blanket pooled about his knees from being seized and hurled away. Mirrorglass—two-way, he guessed, with somebody on the other side scrutinising his every movement—stretched across one wall, bisected by a door. Another door a few steps from his cot was cracked ajar, revealing a tiled floor that had to belong to a ‘fresher, and—

Perched on a cheap folding chair in front of him, witnessing him hurrying to assess his surroundings, sat Luke Skywalker.

Before he—Kylo Ren? Or was he Ben Organa?—could force out any of the words rushing up his throat, half-formed flurries of  _are you here to execute me_  and  _did you save me,_  Luke lifted a hand to show that he meant no harm, quieting him in an instant. “It’s all right,” Luke said softly, once Kylo’s shoulders had gone slack. “You’re on Alinor, in one of the base’s most secure cells,” he continued in that same too-gentle tone, “and right now, I’m shielding you from Snoke. Soon, I’ll teach you how, but for the time being, he has no idea where you are.”

Kylo nodded numbly, releasing a shaky exhale that scraped rasp-raw against his sore throat. For the first time in twenty-nine years, since he’d begun hearing that lullaby-like whisper twining around each thought, his mind felt like it was  _his_  and  _his_ alone. A flicker-quick thrill warmed him from the inside out, and he had the strangest urge to burst out with a laugh. He could think of  _anything_  without it being a betrayal: a house on Naboo with ivy climbing up its walls; his tongue poking out in concentration as he wove his mother’s waterfall of hair into a braid; or his father beckoning him, asking  _c’mon, kid, want to try your luck at being my co-pilot?_

Even the secret he’d tried with all his strength to keep, of a girl he’d stolen and hidden away on Jakku.

It took him another moment to notice that somebody had changed his clothes. Whoever it was, they’d taken everything, including his boots and gloves, and dressed him in a grey shirt with a matching pair of fleece trousers. Each item was as soft as a dream, and the sensation of comfort they brought was at once foreign and far, far more than he deserved, but without his layers to shroud him, he was too exposed. Anyone who so much as glanced his way could see his pale, unscarred hands and their bitten fingernails, his bare feet, his arms, his neck, and worst of all, his face. They’d even been careful to remove the drawstring from his waistband, no doubt as a  _just in case_ that would have amused him if not for what it signified.

 _Unnecessary, but clever,_ Kylo thought with a quirk of his mouth.  _I’m more use to them alive, at least until I tell them what they need to know, and until they decide what to do with me._ He supposed that if they gave him a meal to eat, they’d provide him with cutlery made of flimsy plastic. Maybe, if he wanted to shave, they’d go as far as to send some unfortunate soul to supervise him.

Luke watched him with tired forget-me-not blue eyes, his gaze roving over his scars as though taking thorough inventory of each one, the way a mechanic might catalogue a list of faults to be fixed in a machine. His nostrils flared with a sharp intake of breath at the jagged pink slashes on Kylo’s bicep, and at the smaller, silvery-white nicks that marked the oldest injuries on his forearms, but it was Rey’s scar that he lingered on, following the path that she’d carved up from his clavicle to the bridge of his nose. Without meaning to, Kylo snatched hold of a stray wisp of thought:  _those could have been mended with bacta; did he want to keep them?_

A spark of anger—not Kylo’s—ignited in the air.  _Did Snoke_ make  _him keep them?_

Kylo itched for the safety of his helmet all of a sudden, wherever it was; he wanted to slam it over his awkward features and retreat inside to stop Luke from  _seeing_  him. Maskless, he bowed his head instead, staring as if to burn through the backs of his hands, until the sound of Luke’s voice made him look up.

“I have to ask,” Luke began, leaning forwards and bracing his hands on his knees, his frame tight-strung. Somehow, he’d doused his fury, snuffing it out as easily as caging a candlewick between his fingertips. “Most of the higher-ups insist that we ought to just address you as ‘Ben’ from now on, no matter how it might make you feel.” A frown furrowed his brow, indicating what he thought of that. “It took me longer than I’d have liked, but I managed to convince them that we should give you a choice.” He offered a smile, the one that he’d wear when a discouraged padawan scowled and bemoaned their mistakes, or when he clasped hands singed by training lightsabers in his and smoothed his flesh-and-blood thumb over the wound, erasing it with the kind of magic that only the Force could work, or when—

 _No._ Kylo wrenched himself away from those memories.  _Too painful._

“I get a choice?” he echoed, a part of him vaguely recognising that Luke might be employing a common interrogation tactic against him.

He’d grown up all too familiar with interrogation tactics. Once, as a three-year-old, he’d tilted awake in the middle of the night to the half-muffled sounds of his mother’s choked sobs seeping through the walls. She’d been neck-deep in a flashback and struggling to stay afloat, murmuring to his father about an IT-O droid and a word alien to him.  _Torture._ Back then, as young children did, he’d assumed that his parents were invincible and that nothing could shake them, but he’d balled his small fists in the blankets and made himself listen.

 _Like I was on fire, both hot and cold in every vein,_ she’d said, her voice fraying at the seams. In between Han’s reassurances of  _you’re here_  and  _home now_  and  _never gonna happen again, sweetheart,_ he’d heard her quaver  _like I’d left my body and gone somewhere else, where I could see everything happening to me, and I couldn’t even make myself promise not to scream._

While he’d dragged information out of prisoners’ minds—he’d always been the First Order’s last resort, fetched after the newer model of IT-000 droid had failed—he’d thought, unbidden, of Leia Organa on the Death Star. After years of retching in his quarters when he’d finished, Kylo had learned that often, with some prisoners, it was better to ask  _would you prefer to start by telling me who your allies are, or what your mission is,_ rather than demanding  _tell me who your allies are._ The illusion of choice lulled them into a false sense of agency and loosened their tongues, but most importantly, sped up the whole unpleasant process.

_(Poe Dameron’s bloodied lips split anew as they moved, and each word came out as if it had to be pushed past his teeth. “The Resistance will not be intimidated by you.”_

_According to its logs, the IT-000 had asked for the map’s location no fewer than eight hundred and thirteen times, culminating in Dameron hawking a glob of frothy red spit at the droid. Abandoning his usual quick techniques in favour of his internal clamour of_ the map need the map,  _Kylo Ren pulled harder. “Where… is it?”)_

Perhaps Luke wasn’t above doing the same: pretending to give him an ounce of control, when a group of faceless politicians could well take it away and decide his fate for him.

“Yes, you get a choice,” Luke replied, as though it were the most obvious thing in the entire galaxy. With conviction firm in his voice and eyes that were bright and alive with certainty, he went on, “It matters to  _me_  that we’re calling you by the right name, even if the name you might choose will be tough for me to use. Even if, in my heart—and in your mother’s, too—you’ll always be Ben.” He cocked his head, a trace of an almost-smile flitting across his features. “So, who are you?”

_(“Luke’s one of those people who could get a mountain to move if he asked it nicely enough,” Leia told Ben, with a fond shake of her head. “He’d give it a smile and say, ‘excuse me, but would you mind letting me pass?’, and it’d hop out of his way and apologise for the inconvenience.”_

_“Not like your mom,” Han chimed in, leaning against the doorway and grinning. “She’d just give ‘em one of those_ looks  _of hers and it’d crumble to dust in fear—see, kid, she’s doing it again—”)_

 _Who are you?_ The words burrowed under his skin and into his bloodstream, thundering with his pulse:  _who-are-you-who-are-you._

Kylo peered beyond Luke, examining his own reflection in the mirrorglass stretching across the furthest wall, and thought of a boy who’d never had the chance to live, not really.

Closing his eyes for a moment, he let himself think of the house on Naboo with its rope ladder of creeping ivy, and for reasons unknown, of the moths that had fluttered around it at night. Of how, in summer, when he’d slept with a window ajar, one or two had flown inside, and of how his father had taught him to hold them to set them free without damaging the scales on their delicate, iridescent wings. How he’d beamed with pride each year when a new pencil line was added to his height chart; how he’d ran through the meadows and returned to his mother with a fistful of blue-red millaflowers, white snowblooms, and nova lilies in a medley of vivid colours; and how, before he’d heard Han Solo mutter  _there’s too much Vader in him,_ he’d been excited to become a Jedi, just like his uncle.

As he opened his eyes and brushed against it with the pad of a trembling finger as if discovering it for the first time, he thought of Padmé Amidala’s smooth, perfumed hand cupping his scarred cheek. How she’d told him that his face was both Ben Organa’s and Kylo Ren’s, and that turning to the Dark Side had never meant killing Ben at all. Of how Rey had stood like a blazing beacon in the downpour and sworn that they wanted  _him,_ whoever he was, and not some imaginary all-Light creature too pure to ever waver. Not perfection, not an ideal son, and not a flawless apprentice, but  _him._

He swallowed, weighed up each syllable in his mouth, and at last breathed out, “Ben Organa.”

Speaking the name aloud felt like making a promise, but to whom, he wasn’t sure.

It was as if, somewhere dark, secret, and sore inside Luke, the dawn had broken and illuminated him from within. He did his best to tamp it down, perhaps to avoid being presumptuous and thinking that denying the name  _Kylo Ren_ had meant more than Ben might have intended, but the glitter dancing in his eyes and the suggestion of a smile curling up his lips couldn’t be buried. Something unidentifiable in his face had transformed, making him look at least a decade younger, like a man who hadn’t lost almost everything that he’d held dear fifteen years ago. A hand twitched as though about to reach for him and try to embrace him, but when Ben eyed it as warily as one would a wild animal that could bite, Luke noticed and set it back down in his lap.

With a funny little skip in his heartbeat, Ben realised that he’d  _wanted it;_ nobody, except for the ghosts, had touched him with kindness in so long, he’d forgotten how it felt.

Luke straightened his shoulders and sat up. “Well, Ben Organa,” he said softly, “welcome home.”

 _Ben was never supposed to exist,_ Snoke had said not a day prior, and yet, there he was. He hadn’t been made weak or ruined, as Snoke had warned him, and nor had it felt like slipping on a new skin, or shifting the axis of the world beneath his feet. Half in overwhelming relief and half in disbelief, Ben gave a jerky nod, then felt the absence at his hip. Darting his gaze about the cell with an almost feverish intensity, he blurted out, “My lightsaber—”

“Is in safekeeping for now,” Luke interrupted, “until you’re able to heal your crystal, or else I wouldn’t be shocked if it exploded in your hands. Do you know how?”

Ben shook his head, hating how  _small_ admitting to ignorance made him feel. He’d known how to bleed the crystal—how to bend it to his will, pouring rivers of anger and pain into it until it turned crimson from colourless—but he’d been forbidden to learn how to purify it of such a taint.

“Not to worry; I’ll teach you when you’re ready.” This time, Luke’s smile was short-lived, and when it flickered and died, he chuckled humourlessly and explained, “The higher-ups don’t relish the idea of you being armed at all, and it took some persuasion for them to let me see you. Not with the Force, of course,” he added in a rush, guessing what Ben had assumed, “but I told them that although I might not be your favourite person in the universe, you were hardly going to have the strength to attack me after Elan. And, as you can imagine, an exhausted Force-sensitive trying to smother me with a pillow wouldn’t be much of a threat.”

“You…” Ben searched his uncle’s honest face, wondering how Luke could possibly find it in himself to joke, or to smile, or even to sit in the same room as him, serene as moonlight. “You  _trust_ me.” He clenched his fists and let himself be something close to calmed by the sharp, familiar pinch of his torn nails pressing into the meat of his palms.  _“Why?”_

“Like I said on Elan: you’ve had many chances to make life difficult for us, but you took none of them,” Luke answered, and as if to further his point, began ticking them off on the fingers of his cybernetic hand. As he bent each digit, Ben heard a tiny whir. “When it came to it, you did the exact opposite of what would be expected of somebody truly dedicated to their cause. At any time, you could have informed the First Order of our location. You could have allowed the bombing on Corellia to go ahead without warning your mother, and earlier, you could have killed us to regain Snoke’s favour. And,” he continued, almost quietly victorious, “once, Rey told me that whenever you fight, you don’t take advantage of any of the weak spots that she exposes.”

“She’s powerful, but she’s still a novice,” Ben tried to argue, though it came out as more of a croak. Not even his own voice believed him. “She turned her back on me on Boreas, when I lost my footing and fell on the ice. Walked away with her guard down. I could have…” He trailed off, knowing in his core that he wouldn’t have— _couldn’t_ have—done whatever it was that he’d been about to say.

“What if,” Luke said gently, “she turned her back on you because she  _knew_ that you wouldn’t give chase?” He let the thought of such undeserved trust-but-not-trust expand and fill the space between them, stunning Ben into silence, and then his face dimmed and his words became so soft, Ben had to lean forwards to listen.  _“I_ ought to be the one surprised that I’m being afforded the slightest amount of trust. I  _failed_ you, Ben. And though I immediately agreed to take Rey on as my apprentice—” his breath hitched, and he had to pause, shut his eyes for a second, and breathe, “—I was so afraid that I’d do it wrong again. That even with what I know now, I’d—I’d push her away, too.”

A foggy memory of Rey’s voice, dizzy with pain, arose— _Luke, it’s Snoke, I can feel it in the Force—_ and it struck Ben that she’d addressed Luke by his name, not by  _Master Luke_ or  _Master Skywalker,_ like a padawan would. After what Ben had done on Nysa, could he no longer bear it?

 _I’m so sorry_ teetered on the tip of Ben’s tongue, but instead, he said hoarsely, “It felt like I was a time-bomb.” Blinking back the hot stinging in his eyes, he fought not to think of how  _vulnerable_ Luke had sounded, as though he’d trade anything of his to meddle with the past and stop everything before it was too late. _And so would I._ “Like there was a sickness inside me, lying dormant and waiting. I thought that if you couldn’t, then only Snoke could fix it—fix  _me._ But please—” Ben gripped the sheets to anchor himself, a desperate lilt in his voice,  _“—I_ made my choices, not Snoke. He was there, always, always there no matter what, but I  _chose_ to do what I did. Don’t try to absolve me of responsibility for my actions; it was all  _me.”_

Luke shook his head. “I’m not. I won’t. I just want… I just want you to know that I understand. That I’m sorry.” He sighed and twisted in his chair to aim a glance behind him, at the mirrorglass and whoever watched on the other side. “I’m not going to fool you and tell you that any of this will be easy.”

Ben couldn’t help but cock up an eyebrow. “I was never under the impression that it would be.”

 _But you stayed, didn’t you?_ prodded a little voice at the back of his mind, and for once, it was not unkind.  _If you’d wanted, you could have cheated anyone on Elan out of their ship and disappeared to some far-off planet, where nobody would know to find you. You could have lived under a different identity for the rest of your life, but you chose this: to come home._

“I mean it,” Luke insisted. “You don’t need to support the Resistance’s ideals, and I very much doubt that you do right now, but a great many people around this base have lost someone. Some had their homes destroyed by the First Order, others fled to us from war-torn planets, and most knew— _loved_ —somebody who was in the Hosnian system when Starkiller Base fired.” Spreading out his palms in a gesture of peace, he lowered his tone and said, “I can’t predict how any of them will react to the sight of you; if they’ll hate you and challenge you, or if they’ll try to give you a chance and begrudgingly accept you.”

Cold realisation lanced through Ben’s gut: nobody on Alinor—nobody  _anywhere_ in the galaxy—had any way of knowing that he’d objected to the use of Starkiller Base. For all they knew, he might have been like Hux, gleeful and almost frothing at the bit as he ordered the annihilation of an entire system. And worse still, he thought, though it shouldn’t have startled him so: the odds were high that  _he’d_  been the cause of the losses that some had suffered.

“In a few hours, we’ll be calling a meeting to discuss you,” Luke was saying, selecting his words with care. “It’ll be kept as classified as possible: the only people permitted to attend will be a handful of senior members of staff, several senators via holocall, and your mother and I. We’re both confident that you’ll—"

“They’re all going to want me dead, you know,” Ben interrupted, matter-of-fact.

Whatever he’d expected his uncle’s response to be, it was not a shrug, of all things. “Well, that’s unfortunate for them, since the death penalty isn’t on the table,” Luke said simply. “Your mother wanted to see you when you woke up. Do you think you can handle it?”

 _No,_ Ben thought, breath stalling in his chest. “Yes,” he replied, once he’d salvaged his ability to speak.

A true smile—bright, unguarded, and wide enough to show his teeth—lit up Luke’s face, and in that moment, his resemblance to his old self was so clear that it made Ben ache. “You always were a terrible liar, Ben,” he said, walking towards the door. He tapped a code into a keypad on the wall beside it, and as it hissed open, he stopped at the threshold and added, “I’m glad that hasn’t changed. It means that deep down, you’re still you.”

With that, the door slid shut behind him, and Ben Organa was left alone in his cell with his silent, invisible ghosts.

 

* * *

 

Leia watched Luke and Ben through the two-way mirror with her heart ticking like an old pocket watch against her breast. She’d felt it stuttering with each of her son’s movements, thumping in double-time as he pulled in on himself and then slowly unfurled after Luke reached out in that uncanny way of his, and when Ben had awoken and lurched upright, wild-eyed and seized with fear, she’d thought it might stop beating altogether.

Long ago now, when she’d first become aware of the presence of the Force woven into the very essence of her being, she’d learned that everybody, whether they were Force-sensitive or not, had a colour that glowed about them when she closed her eyes and  _looked._ Each colour had a meaning unique to the individual who bore it, though this she hadn’t discovered until later, and it had seemed unwise even to her younger, bolder self to blurt it out.

Figuring out Rey had been easy. The moment they’d met on D’Qar, Leia had felt bright filaments of gold enveloping her as they’d hugged, and her mind had swum with dawns and dunes and a fierce, blazing sun. She herself was white, and she’d understood why when Luke had told her what Padmé Amidala had intended their names to mean in the ancient language of the Naboo:  _he who is a friend of peace_ and  _she who creates the storm,_ both messages to Vader that said  _these children will bring you home._ Luke was the blue of water and of  _life,_ and she was the colour of a sky swallowed up by thunderclouds, just before the shock of the rain. When her yearning for Alderaan felt like a physical weight, she remembered that there, white had meant  _freedom;_ on Tatooine, Luke had once mentioned, the same could be said of the pitch-black of a desert midnight.

Ben, whose reddened eyes watched as Luke left his cell, had always been silver, sometimes shifting darker, sometimes lighter.

Silver had been a traditional Alderaanian mourning-colour, back when an Alderaanian could weep for one person and not for a whole world. At first, nothing could have been further from her messy-haired, laughing boy, but then as he’d grown up and his gap-toothed beams had become sullen frowns and a sombre face, it had felt  _too_ apt, and she’d ached all the more with each monosyllabic answer and distrustful glance.

Luke stepped out of the cell—somehow, he looked younger than he had in months, and yet like he’d aged a decade in the space of an hour—and said, “He’ll see you.” With a weak, weary ghost of a smile, trying and failing to keep the cracks from his voice, he added, “He wants to be called Ben.”

In an instant, Leia’s eyes started to burn, and she imagined the hands on her clockwork heart spiralling out of control as her pulse raced and boomed in her ears. Her knuckles flew to press against her mouth, damming the flood of choked  _thank you_ s and  _my boy my baby boy_ s struggling to slip out from behind the cage of her teeth. In the fairy tales that Bail and Breha had spun for her by starlight, and in the stories that she’d in turn carried Ben to sleep with, this was how it went: the enchanted hero or heroine, bewitched to forget their true name, reclaimed it and so broke the dark spell that bound them.

_(Ben wriggled under his layers of blankets until only his face and a halo of black hair peeped out. “Tell me a story, Mama.”_

_“Once,” Leia began, perching on the edge of his bed and summoning the words from memory, “there was a young prince, beloved by all the land and especially by his mother, the queen. On a storm-drenched night in the midst of winter, an evil sorcerer stole the prince out of spite. The sorcerer kept the prince locked away high up in a hidden tower, and gave him a new name so that the prince would forget his own and forever belong to him. For a thousand days and a thousand nights, the queen searched for her son, but he was nowhere to be found.” Admitting to it made her feel childish, but she felt a pang of sympathy at the thought: gazing down at Ben with his big shining eyes on her, entranced, she couldn’t fathom ever losing him. “One day, a brave adventurer girl happened upon the tower and sought to fight the sorcerer who dwelled within, and it just so happened that she knew the queen. When she saw the prince, she called him by his true name in awe.”_

_“And then what?” Ben demanded._

_“The prince remembered who he was—who he’d always been—and shattered the sorcerer’s thrall. Now freed, he and the adventurer slew the sorcerer and rode back to the kingdom, where they say the queen cried the largest lake in the realm into existence at the sight of him after so long.” Leia smiled, ruffled Ben’s curls, and made sure to finish with, “And, of course, the prince and the adventurer lived happily ever after.”)_

Pushing past the lump in her throat, she at last made herself reply with a rough-voiced, “Just—I need a moment before I go in.” In the cell, her son, her  _Ben,_ sat on his cot, folded up on himself as if to protect himself. She followed the curve of his spine with her eyes, drinking in every detail: he had his head in his hands and his pale fingers fisted in his untidy waves of hair, and if she looked closer, she could see his frame trembling. “Corellia was more inclined to be forgiving after I told them that he was the one who warned me about the Senate bombing, but Riosa wants him chained up like some kind of  _animal,”_ she told Luke, unable to keep the rising venom out of her words. “They reinstated the death penalty a few years back, remember, so no doubt they’ll be crowing for that, but we don’t do that here and we’ll do it to  _my_ child over my own dead body.”

A glint shone in Luke’s blue eyes, reminding her so much of the man—boy, really—she’d met years ago.  _Anakin’s eyes,_ she thought,  _and I got Padmé’s._ “I could—” he started.

“We are  _not_ using mind tricks on  _anybody,_ least of all any members of the Senate,” Leia interrupted him, holding up a hand, “but if you volunteered to train him, they wouldn’t dare argue with you.” Half of it, she suspected, was out of a lingering unease with Jedi; as a precaution, she’d always kept her own Force-sensitivity as quiet as she could. “That’s if you still want to teach him,” she hedged.

“I do, and I was thinking: maybe he could teach Rey, too. Maybe they could teach each other.” Luke turned to Ben, who’d moved from his hunched position and was now stiff-straight, running a palm over his white blanket as if hypnotised by its softness. Ben’s expression was indecipherable, but not from lack of emotion; rather, from so many of them all at once. “That’s only if Rey agrees to it, though, otherwise I’ll have to train them separately—one in the morning and the other in the afternoon might work. She’s had no choice in getting wrapped up in our Skywalker family nonsense, and with their bond—” He cut himself off and shook his head. “If nothing else, I want her to be able to make her own decisions about  _this.”_

Leia nodded, steering her thoughts away from Rey and Ben’s mysterious bond and how, if her worries had an inkling of truth in them, their very  _lives_ were intertwined. “How’s Rey doing?”

“I wish I knew,” Luke replied, after a pause. He faced her, his brows knitting, and told her, “She’s seemed… subdued ever since we left Elan. Unlike herself. Something’s rattled her, I think, but I couldn’t possibly tell you what.”

“I hope she feels happy with us,” Leia said quietly, remembering the handmade jacket that she’d sent to her on Ahch-To.  _She only took it off to sleep and bathe,_ Luke had said,  _and even then, who knows?_ Rey had arrived on Alinor wearing it, grinning and stroking her thumbs over the sleeves as though it were the finest thing that she’d ever seen in her life.  _Safe,_ Leia added to herself in a heartbeat,  _and loved. All the things I wanted for Ben, but I don’t know if he ever got to feel them, or if that monster snatched them away from him._ She steeled herself as if about to speak in front of a crowd, and declared, “I’m ready now.”

Luke laid his flesh-and-blood hand on her arm in a show of solidarity, giving her more strength than he’d ever guess, then made as if to leave. Stopping mid-step, he asked over his shoulder, “Should I leave you to it or stay and wait outside?”

“Stay,” Leia answered, much quicker than she’d intended.  _Always stay._

He nodded once, and then she ushered in a deep, fortifying breath, typed the cell’s access code into the keypad on the door, and walked inside.

For the first time in fifteen years, Leia found herself standing no more than three metres away from her son. If she managed to unfreeze her limbs, she could clear that distance in moments to be by his side, to sob and shake him and hold him and not let go. She looked at him—Ben Organa, her sweet, mischievous, serious, muddy-kneed, bookish boy; and Kylo Ren, the Jedi Killer, the First Order’s enforcer, and his father’s murderer—and wished with every bit of her that he’d turn into a monster.

Instead, there was only Ben, who she’d grown inside her. Ben, who she’d immediately fallen in love with, after her nine-hour labour had ended in a screaming bundle of a red-cheeked child with a shock of wispy black hair supported in her arms.

As a teenager, Breha Organa had been in an accident that had almost killed her. The cost of her survival had been her heart, her lungs, and her ability to bear children, and her damaged organs had been replaced with pulmonodes that beat and breathed for her. Most people who received pulmonodes chose to cover them up with synthskin, but not the Queen of Alderaan: she’d kept them visible, their orange status lights glowing as soft as fireflies, like the trellises of luminescent candlewick flowers that climbed up the palace’s balconies to bloom at night.

 _I see them and I know that I can survive,_ she’d told Leia, her chin tilted up and a hint of a proud smile playing on her lips,  _and that no matter what, I will always keep going._

Leia would have to keep going, too, even now, when she felt like the ground might crumble away beneath her feet.

Ben lifted his head almost at once, dreamlike, his lips parting as if on the verge of speech.  _This is my son; he’s really here,_ Leia thought, trying to make it sink in. She willed herself not to move an inch, though she doubted that she’d be able to if she tried, and absorbed the sight of him. Even when sitting down, he was strong-looking and obviously tall—perhaps taller than Han had been—and his hair skimmed his collarbones, in dire need of a trim and a good brushing. On his bedside table lay a lump of torn fabric that she recognised in an instant, and—

_His face, oh, his face._

She hadn’t been prepared for the scar up close. Healed to the pink of a seashell, it sliced thick into what she could see of his broad shoulder, tapering off like a comet’s trail as it reached the bridge of his nose.  _Did they not give him bacta,_ she wondered,  _or did he not want it?_

His cheekbones were from her, she was sure, and his eyes were hers. They were Padmé’s, Bail’s, and Breha’s, but almost everything else about him was Han. For a moment, the fine hairs at the back of her neck pricked up as though he were, impossibly, in the room with her, smelling of woodsmoke and nerf-leather and whatever the  _Falcon_ had been oozing, his hands on her waist to hold her steady. In fact, she realised with a little jolt to her chest, Ben was a perfect blend of the two of them, except for the constellations of beauty marks scattered across his pale face, just like the ones that she’d seen in her grainy, stuttering holovids of Padmé.

On Alderaan, gingerbell flowers had been a symbol of hope. Newlyweds and people moving into a new home would hang sprigs of the merry orange blooms above their doorways, keeping them tied there until the bright clusters of petals drained of colour and drifted to the ground. Some had been saved as fragile seedlings and offered to her by a group of Alderaanians who’d been fortunate enough to be off-planet when the Death Star fired. She kept them in a vase in her office, next to her ladalums; they, like her ache for her home, seemed to have no interest in dying, and sometimes, she questioned if she wasn’t somehow keeping them alive with the power of her longing alone.

When she’d turned thirteen, she’d received a bouquet of gingerbells so large that she’d had to peer over the top of it, and as she’d clasped it, she’d thought to herself that she owned all the hope in the galaxy. But watching her  _son_ blink up at her, his fingers white-knuckled in the sheets as if to restrain himself from backing up against the wall to get away, or from throwing his arms about her, Leia decided that she’d been wrong then.

She had all the hope in the galaxy  _now._ Her heart overflowed with it, warm and timid.

Leia wrung her hands, for once uncertain of what to say or what to do or where to stand, more aware of herself than ever. All her cries of  _how could you_ and  _why did you do it_ and  _he was your father, Ben_ had burnt out somewhere in her dry throat. A murmur of  _can you ever forgive me_ fluttered against the roof of her mouth, fighting to break free, but only one hushed word came out.

“Ben?”

 

* * *

 

Ben swallowed hard as his mother stepped into his cell and called his name, soft and hesitant, as though daring to raise her voice would make him shimmer away like a desert mirage and slip through her fingers again. He might have scoffed had he not felt the same: unmoored, and like he needed to cling on to  _something_ to remind himself that this was real and that she’d come for him.

 _There’s always a choice,_ his grandmother had said in a dream.

 _Neither of your parents have time for a child—you belong where you_ aren’t  _thought of as a mistake,_ Snoke had hissed to him as a young boy, winding serpentine about his ears while he hugged his knees under the blankets.  _Your mother will always be afraid of you, my child,_ he’d whispered to Ben just before he fell asleep, until the gusty in-out-in-out of Vader’s breathing in his nightmares shifted too similar to his own. And after yet another of their arguments, with Han storming out and Leia remaining inside to crackle with quiet anger, Snoke had twisted the knife and said, almost sympathetic,  _she and your father regret having you, dear boy. The moment you showed yourself as able to use the Force, she saw Vader in you, and not the wonderful, powerful creature you could be honed to become._

Snoke had been a liar, he knew now, but for a lonely child, he’d been easy to believe. Ben was what the public had dubbed a  _victory kid,_ one of the hundreds of millions of children born not long after the Battle of Endor, when the galaxy was hectic and heady and drunk on its own freedom. Leia Organa had been there at the forefront, armed to the teeth with determination and ready to help patch it back together. His birthday was even on Concordance Day, when the war had ended at last, and rumour had it that Leia had bitten her tongue through her contractions during the signing of the Instruments of Surrender—in the dead of winter, too—and then hurried to give birth to him only nine hours later.

A baby born a mere year after the Empire’s fall swaddled in her arms might have hampered her plans, and by no means had Han Solo been cut out to be a family man.

Yet his father’s ghost had half-smiled, told him  _we loved—_ love— _you more than anything,_ and meant it, no matter how downright impossible it sounded. And while he didn’t want to let himself think about it, knowing that the truth would just destroy him further, the fear he’d felt coming from his parents in great shivery waves could have been  _for_ him, not  _of_ him.

There was the choice he had to make. He could contort his features into a cruel snarl and growl a  _no_ and declare to the woman in front of him that she was Leia Organa, mother of a dead son, even if they put him to death for it. He could choke out a  _Mom_ in his raw voice and shakily make himself stand to kneel by her feet, asking for the forgiveness he’d never deserve. Instead, he nodded, a movement so slight that it almost didn’t register as deliberate, and shaped a whispered  _yes_ with his lips, more like the barest rustle of a breeze than a word.

At his near-silent response, something fractured in Leia, a piece of her not much larger than his closed fist. Her eyes— _his_ eyes, almost—went glassy, and her snowdrop-white signature in the Force spiked with one of her uneven breaths as she fought to keep in her unshed tears.

She took a tentative step towards him with her small, light feet, then another, and another, until he could have reached out and touched her. Ben stood up, not sure of what she meant to do. He had the length of time between two heartbeats to wonder if she’d strike him before her arms were around him and she was clinging to him like her world had ended again and he was all that she had left, a salvaged scrap of a man who had to pause to remember how to embrace and be embraced.

Ben pressed his teeth into the inside of his bottom lip until he tasted a familiar coppery tang, then gave up and crumbled all over her, holding her as tightly as he could without hurting her.

With his mind refusing to function, he only had the space for one thought:  _has she always been this tiny?_

He’d grown taller than her by the age of eleven; she’d smiled and tutted as she’d etched a fresh pencil line onto the growth chart on his bedroom wall, joking  _you’ll be towering over Wookiees by the time you’re twenty, mark my words._ But a few months after that, she’d sent him away, and so she hadn’t been there to see him change from a big-eared boy with skinned knees to a gangly teenager and then to the man he was now, or to the man he could have become. What ached most was the fact that  _he_ hadn’t been there to watch grey streaking itself like cloud-linings through her crown braid, or the scant wrinkles blooming on her face.

A rough gasp of a noise that he’d  _never_ call a sob left his throat. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t let them do it,” he got out, his voice too thick. His vision swam, and he tried to make himself ignore the niggling needle-jab of  _weak foolish boy crying is for children did I not craft you to be better than this_ dredged up from the depths of memory. One memory, to be precise: of being a fifteen-year-old who’d just made his first kill, dazed by how easily his new lightsaber had slashed through flesh, his stomach roiling sick with the  _wrongness_ of it all. “I couldn’t have stood by and not intervened.”

He  _needed_ her to know that he would never have let her die. The thought of abandoning her to her death hadn’t crossed his mind, and with every breath in his body, he despised the idea of her receiving Rey’s message and questioning, even if it was just for a second, if her own son had been tempted to allow the Senate Building to be bombed with her inside.

“I know,” Leia murmured against his chest, the relief of it knocking him dizzy. “Never in a million years would I have thought that you could.” Her narrow shoulders quivering, she held him closer, if that was at all possible, and said in a voice not far above a whisper, “All this time, I carried you in my heart with me.”

A song. She was quoting from an old Alderaanian song that she used to hum for him after he’d rocketed awake from a nightmare. It was slower and sweeter than the rest, mingling with his calm breathing and the gentle glow of moonlight as he slipped back off to sleep, his head now full of pleasant dreams. Sometimes, she’d start to sing it in a soft, wistful voice that reminded him of things he’d never known, of crystalline palaces and prisms of rainbow-tinted sunlight glimmering on the ground; paintings made from the wind and seas of flowers; ribbon-tied sprigs of mistletoe and bouquets of gingerbells hanging above doorways; blue wedding dresses for a peaceful marriage and green gowns for luck; and holovids of a beautiful queen with gleaming chalcedony about her neck.

Even after years spent trying to erase all connections between himself and Alderaan, or himself and his family, Ben still remembered the first lines. He felt the oddest nostalgic impulse to mouth along to them, as though he were a boy whose troubles could be soothed with the right melody:  _I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart._

“Luke’s already told you about the meeting we’ll be having, hasn’t he?” Leia asked once she’d reluctantly pulled away, swiping the back of her hand over her red-rimmed eyes. When Ben nodded, she went on, her tone hoarse but cast-iron certain, “I’m not going to let  _anything_ happen to you—you’re safe with me, you understand?”

“Safe,” Ben repeated, as if the word was foreign to him. It might as well have been: he couldn’t recall ever feeling truly safe, not even when he’d been little; Snoke had seen to that. Shadows had crept like spies over his childhood, sapping the tunes from his nursery rhymes until they were messes of discordant notes, and leaching the brilliant colours from the fireworks at the Festival of Light on Naboo until there was no light for him at all. “Safe,” he said again, the volume of his voice rising, “when it would take me less time to list the people inside this very base who  _don’t_ have a good reason to want me executed?” His cheeks flushed scalding-hot with shame as she tried to hide her flinch, and quieter now, he told her, “They know what I’ve done, Mo—General. They’ll assume that—that I’m here for the First Order, because I’ve fooled you, not because…”

 _Because what, Ben?_ he asked himself, trailing off with the most minute shake of his head. Raking a hand through his hair and giving the roots a small tug in frustration, he tried to find the words to finish his sentence.

In a mere moment, Leia’s demeanour switched from that of his mother to that of General Organa of the Resistance. “Some will assume that, yes.” Sharp and to the point, she nodded. “We’re at war, Ben: we’re all on our guard, and we can’t afford  _not_  to be,” she said, and then continued, “and you wouldn’t be the first to face that kind of suspicion. When Finn came to us, there were some—a handful, mind you—who approached me in private with concerns about him being a First Order plant, worrying that it might be too risky to trust him. Besides—” she gave him a tiny flicker of a smile, “—you’ve always been awful at acting and covering up how you feel, so I doubt that you’d manage to trick me if you  _were_ a spy.”

“Finn,” Ben bit out, his clunky tongue tripping over the name and almost saying  _FN-2187_ instead, “was a stormtrooper, stolen away from a family he doesn’t remember, and conditioned from infanthood for nothing but fighting and dying.  _He_ had no choice in the matter.”

Leia raised an eyebrow. “And you’re telling me that you did?” she asked, her tone dry and clearly unconvinced. “That even if there had been no Snoke, this would still have happened?” One of her fists clenched and unclenched, as though she were desperate to touch him once more, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Ben wanted her to—he might fall apart otherwise—but begging for his mother to  _hold me please just hold me_ would make him feel like a child, or like the broken thing that he was, so he stood unmoving until she implored, “I want to know you again.”

 _“I_ don’t know me,” Ben admitted.  _And how could I,_ he thought.

“Well, we can figure all of that out together,” Leia replied, unruffled, shifting to perch on the chair that had been placed in front of his cot. She was so petite that the seat barely groaned under her weight, and Ben supposed that if  _he_ were to try to fit on it, he’d have to fold himself up. Unwilling to loom over her like a nightmare, he sat on the edge of the cot, cursing his unwieldy, too-long legs; even like this, he still dwarfed her. “There’s time.”

“You—you don’t know anything about what I’ve done,” he told her, though it was a blatant half-truth: she knew of what he’d done to Han, to Luke, and to Rey, but there were a hundred more beside them. He’d slaughtered dozens upon dozens, and if their blood was on his hands, it’d take him an eternity to scrub them clean. How could anybody consider forgiving a person so monstrous?

“I didn’t think it was possible, but you’ve only grown  _more_  stubborn the older you’ve become.” Leia frowned. “So determined to believe that there’s no way anybody could ever love you.” A shimmersilk thread of thought meandered over to him and grazed against his ears:  _did Snoke do that to him, or are we to blame, too?_

Clamping his lips together and gulping down a barbed response, Ben forced himself to say nothing. However jagged he felt inside, he didn’t want to subject her to it, not now.

“And you’re wrong, Ben: I do know what you’ve done. I know every bit of it.” His mother’s words were imbued with steel, and her dark eyes flashed hard. “Out of everybody on this planet, you’ve probably hurt me the most. I didn’t just lose a husband, I lost a best friend. I spent years— _years,_ Ben—wondering if the next time I’d see my son face-to-face again, he’d be in a body bag recovered from a battlefield. And despite that, despite everything, I’m still your mom.” A series of movements out of the corner of his eye drew him to Leia’s trembling hands, but her gaze remained intense enough to shrink him to the size of an ant. “I want to know why,” she whispered then. “Luke and I—we’ve talked ourselves sore, and we think we understand what made you turn, what Snoke did, and how… how we didn’t exactly help you. But I want to know why—why your father? Why did it have to be him?”

Ben pressed his fingertips into the hollows of his knees, steadying himself with the dull throb of discomfort, and began, “Snoke said that it would make me stronger.” Spoken aloud, it felt so pathetic, so flimsy; he’d been so  _stupid_ to have trusted a word of what Snoke had promised him. As he kept going, his voice shattered to pieces, but he dug his fingers in deeper, determined to finish. He owed her that, at least. “It was—it was to be a test. I was… conflicted, between the Light and the Dark, and he told me that I needed to kill Han to make it stop. To kill Ben Organa, once and for all. To kill the Light.” His nails pinched into his skin through his trousers, and he knew that there would be a chain of pink half-moons imprinted into his flesh. “I—I murdered Han—my father, my own father—for a lie—”

After his voice dwindled to nothing, Leia was silent for what felt like a century, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. He’d ruined everything, he realised with mounting dread: he’d broken the fragile trust budding between them, and now, she saw only a creature wearing her son’s face sitting before her. In a moment, she’d stiffen, freeze glacier-cold, hiss  _you are no child of mine,_ and leave without sparing him a backward glance. Perhaps she’d stand and watch, white-lipped and icy, as he was dragged off to his execution, or she’d wish not for him to come home as she had for years, but to have given birth to a better son.

He expected her to surge to her feet and cast him aside, but she stayed. “When you were born,” she started, so quiet that he had to strain to hear her, “I held you in my arms and I thought you were the tiniest, most breakable thing in the galaxy. It was as if somebody had taken my heart and placed it outside my body, into another little person. Nothing could have prepared me for how raw each moment of joy, or each moment of sadness, would feel as you grew up.” Reaching over, her eyes glistening, Leia bridged the gap and clasped his hands in hers. “I would  _never_ be able to stop loving you, Ben, even when I look at you and I see Han’s features and countless what-could-have-beens and things that were taken from us and my heart aches all over again.”

Stunned breathless—pulseless, too, he thought—Ben fixed his gaze on their linked hands. He didn’t notice the goosebumps winding their way up his wrists, or that he’d been gripped with the slightest of shivers, until the warmth of her palms spread into him, almost as if it were lighting him up.

“You still have it,” Leia said all of a sudden, and he followed her eyes to the neat pile of torn black fabric folded on his bedside table. “The cape, you kept it.”

“Raggedy old thing,” Ben muttered, but his words had no bite to them.

_(“Hey, bandit, we’re sorry we can’t come and visit you today,” said the pre-recorded holo of Han Solo. Behind him, a harried-looking Leia Organa frowned into the mirror, her expert fingers styling her hair into an elaborate braid with purple and gold ribbons woven into the strands. “I know thirteen’s supposed to be an important birthday and all, but your mom has a big meeting with the Senate—you know how those stuffy old coots are—so we’ve sent your gift over to you. Your mom had it made, says it’ll suit you—”_

_Ben scowled, flicked off the holocomm, and glared down at the cape. After checking to see that he was alone in the boys’ bunk, he picked it up and sniffed it, like a child. It smelled floral, like his mother’s favourite ladalum perfume, but also of nerf-leather with faint notes of starship fuel and space, like his father. If he were younger—if he was still naïve enough to think that they’d stick to their promises of coming to visit him on Nysa as often as they could, rather than always cancelling for the Senate or for smuggling—he’d hold it to his nose and breathe it in, and then fall asleep with it wrapped around him._

_Now that he was growing up and learning what to expect and how to be disappointed, he tossed it aside and rolled onto his front, burying his face in the pillow.)_

The memory stung like a reopened wound, but Leia started smoothing her thumbs over the backs of his hands, as though hoping to map out every fissure in him and fill each of them in with sheer willpower alone. That kind of magic happened only in fairy-stories, though he didn’t dare move or try to pull away from her, and nor did he want to. If he  _were_ living in a story, one brimming with heroes and happy endings, Snoke would choke on bile at the merest thought of him held by his mother and surrounded by the enemy, and would rage himself to death in the manner of a villain from an old tale.

Not just that, but Han’s ghost would be there with him and Leia, ready with that grin of his and a relieved  _glad you finally found some sense in you, kid._ Had his father even appeared to her, or had he been the first to see him? Had she ever turned around to find Han there, illumined with a star-kissed glow, beaming and greeting her with  _hey there, sweetheart_ as she fought not to stumble over in shock, or had Padmé ever breezed into being for her to bestow a gentle smile upon her? Had Luke met with either of them? He must have, Ben decided; on Elan, when he’d mentioned the ghosts, Luke’s expression had changed to knowing and—with no other word to describe it—almost triumphant.

He’d been lost somewhere in his own mind when Leia began to hum to herself, his hands still in hers. It took him a moment of listening and absorbing the soft, yearning melody before he recognised it: ‘Mirrorbright’, the Alderaanian lullaby.  _His_ childhood lullaby.  _It’s funny,_ she’d once said to Han, unaware that Ben was eavesdropping,  _but Alderaan never had a moon of its own. Sometimes, I catch myself thinking about it and wondering if, when the Death Star appeared in the sky, the children had that song playing in their heads just before it fired._

‘Mirrorbright’ was the song that had twinkled in the music box that he’d passed over to Unkar Plutt, trading all his credits and two of his most precious possessions in exchange for what he’d believed would be a family and a comfortable home for Rey, not a sunken AT-AT, an empty belly, and a wall covered from top to bottom with thousands of scratched-in tallies.

Nothing could ever erase Jakku, or his own idiocy in trusting Plutt’s word, but Rey needed to know her past. To see herself from years ago, and to understand more of who she was. He’d give her memories back to her as soon as he could, he resolved, and if she snarled at him and demanded that he leave her be afterwards, he’d respect her wishes. Even if—and this he hesitated to admit to himself, despite there being no Snoke to punish him for it—he wanted to know her and her wide, sun-bright smile again.

 _Those you loved are with you still; the moon will help you remember,_ Leia’s humming finished, fading away into an almost peaceful silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I have a lot of emotions about Alderaan? The majority of its traditions (like [gingerbells](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gingerbell) for hope and the meaning of colours) are made up, but ['Mirrorbright'](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mirrorbright_\(song\)) is a real lullaby, and in _Bloodline_ , Leia speculates to herself in horror about the Alderaanian children thinking of the song once they saw the Death Star.
> 
> Breha Organa received [pulmonodes](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pulmonodes) to replace her heart and lungs after an accident when she was sixteen years old, but chose to keep them uncovered.
> 
> The song Leia quotes from, with the lyrics 'I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart' are taken from a poem by e.e cummings, [[i carry your heart with me (i carry it in]](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49493/i-carry-your-heart-with-mei-carry-it-in).
> 
> Luke mentions [lightsaber purification](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Purify) to Ben, where a Force user removes the taint of the Dark Side from a previously-bled red kyber crystal.
> 
> The [Festival of Light](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Festival_of_Light) is a Nabooian celebration, commemorating the planet's anniversary of joining the Galactic Republic. 
> 
> Ben's birthday is canonically on the day that the [Galactic Concordance](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Concordance) was signed. Leia accompanied Mon Mothma to sign the Instruments of Surrender and then gave birth to baby Ben on the same day. I saw that detail and just _had_ to include it in this fic.


	7. Five for Silver, Six for Gold

About an hour after Leia left his cell to discuss his fate with a shadowy group of strangers, the Resistance brought the galaxy’s most feared killer a plate of sandwiches.

Ben embarrassed himself by gaping like a fool when a droid wheeled in bearing the platter, assuming for a moment that he was about to be on the receiving end of a practical joke, or that he’d gone mad and was hallucinating a place where prisoners were actually  _fed._ He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten: the gnawing pangs scraping at his gut had shifted to a dull, bricklike weight in the pit of his stomach, so it had to have been two days ago or more, though he’d gone empty-bellied for much longer in the past. When Snoke had asked— _demanded—_ it of him, he’d had no choice but to obey.

Kylo Ren had, after all, given Snoke everything, even his own father.

Hungry as he was, he was also far too anxious to eat, and his innards felt like they’d clenched lock-tight with nerves. Then, unbidden, an image came to him of Rey alone in the wastes of Jakku and listlessly chewing on a lump of veg-meat, no doubt fantasising of a banquet spread out just for her, and the sheer thought of her yearning made him try.

The sandwiches had been cut into crustless triangles of white bread as though for a small child, the way he’d once liked them when he’d been young, and they were filled with thin slices of cheese and smoked meat. Next to them was a little clear pot stuffed to the brim with pieces of Corellian apple and a handful of blood-red sweetberries that looked so fat that they’d burst with flavour on his tongue. And as if that wasn’t already too much for a murderer, they’d given him a plastic cup that contained a fruity purple juice sweeter than anything he’d tasted in years. After over a decade spent surviving on a nutrition-controlled First Order diet that was almost as bland coming back up as it was going down, he had to pace himself so as not to drink it all in one gulp.

For what must have been hours, though he could only guess without a chronometer or a window, he alternated between hunching up on his cot and pacing through the cell and its attached ‘fresher so much, part of him expected to find a set of Ben-sized footprints worn into the ground behind him. His body hummed like a live wire and he held himself as if on a knife’s edge, not daring to relax even one muscle in case somebody burst through the door, shoved him into a pair of stun-cuffs, and dragged him out.

If that happened, he decided that he wouldn’t fight back, his pride be damned. He’d chosen this, for better or for worse.  _Wanted_ it—to come home to his mother and Rey and whatever awaited him on Alinor—more than he’d wanted to run and forget himself.

By the time they came to a verdict, the skin around Ben’s ragged fingernails was sore, shiny-raw, and on the verge of bleeding, and some miracle had allowed him to pick at the sandwiches and the fruits until he’d finished them. When the door slid open with a pneumatic  _hiss,_ he froze and whipped his gaze towards it, his pulse racing, but no one surged in to announce that he’d soon be executed. Nobody approached to inject him with Force-suppressants that would blind him to the universe around him—he’d prefer the death penalty over that, as he’d explained to Rey in their meadow-dream.

Instead, Leia Organa walked in, limned in harsh artificial light from the room behind her. She paused at the threshold as though searching for the right words to start off with, then her shoulders sagged in defeat as she gave up, hurried forwards, and wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug that stole every breath of air from his lungs. Ben couldn’t help but stiffen in her arms, still unused to being touched with kindness, and it took him another few of his pounding heartbeats before he drew her close, inhaling her oh-so-familiar scent of caf and ladalum perfume.

“Luke’s volunteered to take you on as an apprentice; he’s going to teach you again,” Leia said against his chest, her relief palpable in her voice. “He’ll be training you along with Rey, either as her partner, or—well, I suppose he’ll have to ask her what  _she_  wants, first.” As she pulled away, her lips curled into a weary, watery smile, and she continued, “You won’t face imprisonment, I made sure of that, but you’ll be on probation for a year and a day. Any journeys off-planet must be accompanied by another person—Luke, Rey, C-3PO, whoever—and reported beforehand to a high-ranking member of staff, like me, or that’ll count as a violation.”

His mother might as well have spoken to him in Ewokese, for all the sense her words made.  _I_ killed  _him,_ Ben thought madly, clamping his mouth shut to stop himself from blurting it out loud,  _I killed Dad, and he’ll never fly again because of me, but I get to? I get to see the stars and be free, and all he got was a lightsaber through the chest courtesy of his own son? I ought to be grateful, but how is that fair?_ Swallowing hard, he buried the near-hysteria as far down inside him as it would go, met her eyes, and echoed in incredulity, “They’re letting me off-planet?”

Leia nodded, and Ben couldn’t believe the amused glint in her eyes. “Turns out that saving someone’s life makes them a bit more reluctant to dole out a death sentence and call it a day,” she said with wry satisfaction. “Some needed more winning over than the others, but they were quick to set themselves straight once I reminded them that we’d all be dead if not for you.” She raised a brow as though challenging him, and added, “And I told them that you’d be able to give them as much First Order intel as you can.”

“I don’t know as much as they’re hoping,” Ben replied, frowning. As if on cue, a voice at the back of his mind that was both his and not his jeered  _aren’t you useless;_ to block it out, he dug his torn-up nails into his palm until he winced. “Certainly not enough to win the war for you; I wasn’t part of the formal First Order structure, and so I never had their full trust. I—I could give them the locations of a few key weapons bases and stormtrooper training facilities, but that’d be it.”

“That’s just what we need,” Leia told him. “I’ve gone ahead and booked us a conference room in advance, and Admiral Statura’s agreed to hear whatever you have to say. It’ll be just us three, I promise.” She laid a reassuring hand on his arm, the gesture as good as an  _I’ve got you,_ and the tight, stifling ball of worry knotted behind his ribs began to unravel. “Are you ready?”

Ben answered with a tiny upward twitch of his head, the closest thing to a nod that he could muster. Leia keyed in the code to operate the cell door, then placed her hand back on him as though intent on guiding him every step of the way, even if they were seen. He relished the muted glow of human warmth and comfort as she led him out, finding new solace in it: she held on to him not out of concern that he’d try to escape or that she’d somehow lose him again, but because—despite being small-framed and not quite collar-height on him—she seemed to  _know_ by instinct that she was keeping him anchored.

 _Life,_ colourful and bright, struck him the very instant they left the cell block.

It threw him more than he’d be willing to admit, and he prayed that his mother hadn’t felt his jolt of surprise or noticed the greed in how he scanned his surroundings, eager to absorb everything. Aside from the boxed-in, uniform greyness of the  _Finalizer,_ Snoke had only ever trained him on worlds too dead for anything to grow or for anybody to call their home, beginning with murky, storm-shattered Irkalla, where he’d waited to receive him and the other Knights after the Praxeum fell. Later, there had been Moraband, scarred with ancient tombs and the restless spirits that lurked within, and Dromund Kaas, twisted beyond repair by the Sith of millennia ago. Perhaps that had been the point: if those planets were so tainted that they snuffed out all living things trying to survive there, then so too would they smother what remained of Ben Organa.

On the surface, Alinor’s base looked almost as austere with its chrome-white walls and labyrinthine corridors, but here, everything was dizzyingly alive. Tall, wide windows revealed that beyond a stretch of vibrant fields, they were encircled by a forest of trees splashed in hues of lush greens and honeyed autumn yellows, each towering to slice through the clouds. Golden rivers of leaf-dappled sunlight trickled in through the transparisteel to pool at his feet.

Without having to strain his ears, he could hear laughter— _real_ laughter, the sound almost alien. Snippets of conversations zipped through the air like dragonflies, just  _begging_ for him to seize one between his fingertips and listen to what people who didn’t have the galaxy weighing on their shoulders talked about—

“Between you and me,” Leia confessed as they walked, interrupting his train of thought, “they’re all guilt-ridden, the lot of them.” Keeping her voice low so as not to be overheard, she went on, “Countless times, I warned the Senate about the First Order: I told them that they were using those blasted IT-000 droids; that they were building up fleets; that they were mobilising stormtrooper armies. If they’d just  _listened_ to me, the Hosnian Cataclysm wouldn’t…” Her grip on his arm tensed and she sped up, as if trying to put distance between herself and that thought, before she sighed and slowed down to match his pace.

No sooner had she trailed off than his mind burned with a freezeframe of a girl lit by the scarlet glare of firelight—a friend or a protégé, he judged from the shiver of sadness that rippled in the air. Though she was a still image, her body was stiff with terror and her brown eyes as round as twin moons, reflecting Starkiller Base’s energy beams as they hung in the sky before her. Whoever she was, she felt so solid to him—to  _Leia—_ that he could have been there with her on Hosnian Prime, watching the world end.

“I shouldn’t say that,” Leia said at last, and the mirage of the girl with the frightened eyes vanished. For a moment, her voice carried with it the burden of her bone-deep fatigue, and in the next, all traces of it were gone with the dead girl and a billion other lives. “But I hate that it had to come to  _that_  for them to hear me.”

“I didn’t—” All of a sudden, Ben’s throat was too narrow for him to speak, and what he wanted to say felt too hollow. “I didn’t want them to fire it.”

Before that day, he’d made a short-lived attempt at justifying it to himself, repeating everything that Snoke had said about  _restoring order_ and  _ensuring eventual peace_ and  _necessary show of power,_ as though clinging to the childish hope that saying it over and over would make it come true. Of course, he hadn’t believed a word he’d tried to tell himself, and nor would any son of Alderaan. Not when, on the anniversary of Alderaan’s destruction each year, Leia’s grief had been a silent fourth person in the house, casting shadows that eclipsed her and left behind a pale ghost with a sliver of her former smile. Not when she’d named him  _Organa,_ not  _Skywalker_ or  _Solo_ or  _Amidala,_ so that her homeworld’s blood would always run in his veins, even when her pulse stopped beating in her own.

Leia paused mid-step, coming to an abrupt halt just before the door to what Ben presumed was the conference room. Whirling around to face him, she whispered, “Did you feel it?”

Pressing his lips into a thin line at the memory, Ben forced himself to nod. Belatedly, he realised that she’d expected a verbal response, something to confirm what her unbreakable adamant-and-diamond heart already knew: her son had never been lost to her. “It was as if I could sense the exact moment that every person, every single life became this yawning  _nothingness,”_ he ground out, and that was all that he could offer her without making himself sick.

In his studies of the old texts that Snoke had preserved for him, he’d learned of wounds in the Force: after a great tragedy or traumatic event, huge gashes would be ripped in the fabric of the spidersilk web that linked all things, leaving in their wake an emptiness like a sky without its stars. One doubtless lay where the Hosnian system had been, and any Force-sensitive, no matter where they were, would have felt it becoming a  _was_ from an  _is_ in the blink of an eye. The night he’d discovered that  _people_ could be corrupted into still-living wounds—roiling pits of anger and suffering and endless, grasping hunger—he hadn’t been able to sleep for imagining such lonely, lifeless lives.

“An overwhelming absence,” Leia murmured, as though to herself. She reached for the door’s access pad, but her hand stilled and curled into a fist, and a swell of her sorrow hit him like a punch to the gut. “I thought nothing could compare to losing Alderaan, but it turns out that watching the  _same stars-damned thing_ happen again thirty-four years later is far worse, just when you think the galaxy might have  _learned_ something.” Shaking herself out of it, she started tapping in a code, then said in an almost matter-of-fact tone, “You know, the grief comes in waves. At first, you don’t feel it, but then it swamps you in gigantic tsunamis, so close together that you can’t catch your breath and you think you’ll drown. As time goes on, without you noticing, they shrink and get further and further apart, and you can see them coming when certain things—a smell, a sound, a particular phrase—remind you of what you’re missing.”

She’d opened the door and ushered him inside by the time it dawned on him that she’d been talking about something— _somebody—_ else, not just Alderaan, and that she’d been asking, in a way that didn’t require an answer,  _have you let yourself mourn him yet?_

 _I don’t have the right to,_ Ben thought, as a short man with salt-and-pepper hair and the straight shoulders of a soldier stood up, introduced himself as Admiral Statura, and gave Ben’s hand a quick pump up and down. Ben sat opposite Statura when directed to do so, arranging himself onto a plastic chair designed for somebody a fraction of his height; beside him on another chair, Leia’s feet dangled, the tips of her toes only skimming the floor.  _He’s not for me to grieve, not when I was the one who killed him._

There must have been a hundred more important things that his mother could have chosen to spend her afternoon on, but without him having to ask, she sat beside him as he talked until his mouth ran dry and his voice crackled off his tongue like static.

She stayed as he told Statura of how he’d been trained on Dromund Kaas for the past six months, explaining that the planet was half-forgotten and impossible to find unless you knew precisely where to look, and that if Snoke had an ounce of common sense in him, he’d have relocated himself and the Knights of Ren. She stayed—and let out a sharp little exhale of relief—as he spoke of how the First Order had no plans for another superweapon on the scale of Starkiller Base, and as he gave them the bases that he’d mentioned to her: six in total, two for hoarding weapons and four for would-be stormtroopers, each holding thousands upon thousands of children. She even stayed, her knuckles blotching white with fury, as he concluded by listing the names of senators both dead and alive who’d been donating in secret, pledging millions of credits towards wiping out the very New Republic they’d sworn to protect.

Statura’s focus never strayed from his datapad, where he’d been typing notes with fingers as swift as lightning, as he thanked Ben for his co-operation and granted him leave. Almost at once, Leia leapt out of her seat, as though consumed by the need to busy herself instead of tying herself up in knots dwelling on what he’d told them.

“Follow me,” she said, one foot already partway out the door. “I’ll show you to where you’ll be sleeping from now on.”

As she led him down a maze-like warren of sunlit corridors, Ben floated along behind her as if caught between a fever dream and the living world, gritting his teeth and quelling the impulse to pinch his skin pink to prove to himself that he was awake. The mere idea of it defied belief: the Resistance had given him a warm cell, comfortable clothes, and a platter of food from their own kitchens, and now they’d set aside a room for him. He wondered if they insisted on treating  _every_ prisoner of theirs with such kindness—surely not, he decided; the  _real_ cells for those less valuable had to be in a different wing of the base—or if they were being so bizarrely soft with him just because he was General Organa’s son.

At the end of one hallway, Leia produced a keycard from her pocket and swiped it over a lock beside a door. Resting a hand on the durasteel, about to push it open, her features clouded with uncertainty and she hedged, “I’m not sure what… what  _he_ had you living like, so you might find this to be a bit small in comparison, but…”

In no universe could his— _his—_ quarters have been called  _small._

They were the same size as Rey’s, from what he’d seen when he’d projected himself into them. Less like the cupboard he’d been expecting and more like a palace, they were large enough to fit a bed, nightstand, wardrobe, set of shelves, and an en-suite ‘fresher. Ben wandered in on legs that didn’t feel as though they belonged to him, his gaze first devouring the thick quilt spread across the bed; then the water shower with its array of knobs to control the temperature and the pressure; and then the basket of soaps coloured like gemstones, giving off a medley of scents—pine, citrus, lavender, vanilla, and peppermint. As he’d assumed, they hadn’t given him razors with which to shave, but he wouldn’t need them: next to the soap basket was a bottle containing a gel that, according to its label, promised to remove hair in a matter of minutes.

A prickle at the nape of his neck told Ben that Leia was watching him, and perhaps had been for a while. He willed himself not to turn around, shying away from the prospect of seeing just how much she loved him shining in her eyes—that, on top of every other unearned display of generosity, would be far too much for him to bear. “How do you feel about it?” she asked. “Luke taking you on as an apprentice again?”

He’d sworn that he wouldn’t, but Ben couldn’t help spinning to face her. “I don’t  _deserve_ his second chances—” The word  _Mom_ almost slipped from his lips, and though he stopped himself a split-second before it could fling itself out, Leia’s mouth twitched into what could nearly be described as a smile. “He came to my cell and talked to me as if we were sitting down for afternoon tea, and not like I’d destroyed all that he’d been working for.” With a forceful shake of his head and a cracking voice, he added, “Like I hadn’t ruined  _everything.”_

“You know Luke: he can be as stubborn as an old bantha when he wants to be,” Leia replied, her smile growing. “He’s made up his mind that he wants to train you and, in his own words, ‘do it right this time’. If he’s decided that he wants to teach you even in spite of what you’ve done to him—and what  _we_ did to  _you—_ he’s damn well going to.”

“He wants me to train with  _Rey,”_ Ben countered, though grasping for excuses made him feel like a petulant child. “Mustafar will freeze over before she ever agrees.”

Leia let out a noncommittal hum. “I don’t know; I wouldn’t bet on her refusing.” At his quizzical stare, she cocked up an eyebrow and explained, “In case you haven’t noticed, she’s just as stubborn as Luke—if not more so—and if she wanted to hate you or never have you around her, she wouldn’t have gone to Elan for you. She’d have asked me to go instead, or maybe, if she  _really_ despised you, she wouldn’t have told us that you were in danger. And,” she went on, as though pulling out a winning sabacc card, “she wouldn’t have asked so many questions about you.”

“Like what?”

“What you were like when you were young. What happened to make us send you away.” Her expression thoughtful, Leia continued carefully, haltingly, “You represent something important to her, Ben. She’s heard from Luke that you were her favourite person at the Praxeum, and that means  _everything_ to a girl who had nowhere to belong until she arrived here. To have come to Nysa from wherever she was before—I don’t know where, but it can’t have ended well—and to have felt safe with you and the other padawans, however short-lived, would’ve meant the world.” Crossing the room to the window, she tugged open the curtains and let in streams of bright daylight. “Now, she loves her friends, but… she’s a girl without a past. She can’t remember her family, or if they even cared for her. The cleaning droids told me that it took her a  _month_ to change anything about her new quarters, as if she’d worried that it was too good to be true.”

A blunt pang ricocheted through Ben’s chest. For a heartbeat, he mistook it for Rey’s lifelong ache bleeding into him through the bond, but then realised that it was an ache  _for_ her, and for the slow but steady unfurling of a girl apprehensive to decorate her own space for fear of losing it to a girl whose plants and collected trinkets lined every surface. Not wanting to think of a tiny, sleepy-eyed Rey leaning against him and murmuring  _I had those dreams again,_ or clinging to him and whispering  _Ben, there was so much fire,_ he made himself look out the window at the forest, marvelling at what he saw.

Birds—more than he could count at once—wove and dove in and out of the trees. They were too far away for him to make out the colours of their feathers, but if he focused hard enough, he could feel the fluttery thrum of their pulses quivering in the Force. It reminded him of summer afternoons spent crouching by the lakeside on Nysa with Rey,  _sensing_ dragonflies before seeing them and holding statue-still so as not to startle them as they darted by.

Ben was about to say  _please, ask Rey if she’ll see me; I’ll give her Nysa_ when Leia spoke, gazing out towards the sun with her back still turned to him. “Earlier, Luke mentioned that you’ve talked to Han and Padmé. How is that possible?”

“It was Anakin,” Ben replied, knowing that even if Anakin was  _Grandfather_ to him, she’d always refused to think of him as her father.  _Anakin Skywalker might have been my blood, but Bail Organa was my father,_ he’d once overheard her telling Han, her tone firm and final. “Somehow, Snoke was blocking him from reaching me on his own, so he—he used his powers to let them try to reach me instead. Except for that, they’re like normal Force ghosts; they can choose who gets to see them and… they can’t touch us.”  _What does it say about me that I_ want  _them to be able to?_  “Padmé could, but I saw her in a dream. Before that, I’d only ever seen her in holos, and yet she felt so… so real.”

“I’ve dreamed of her before,” Leia breathed. “Never when… She never came to me when I didn’t need her, as if she  _knew._ She was as beautiful and as kind as they all say, and I’d wake up with an ache in my heart, wishing that she could have stayed a little while longer.” With a soft, wistful sigh, she turned to meet his eyes, golden light illumining each strand of hair escaping from her crown braid. “What was Han like?” she asked, and Ben could hear her fighting to keep a quaver from her voice. “What did he say to you?”

He’d shatter if he made eye contact with her now, so Ben fixed his gaze on a point beyond her, watching a v-shaped formation of birds soaring out of the treetops and across the sky until they became black pinprick-specks in the distance. “He looked young, like how I remember him from when I was small,” he told her, pushing on despite blurring vision and a voice perilously close to breaking. “He said that I was never—I was never a bad son. That he knew what would happen when he shouted my name on Starkiller Base, but he did it anyway. Because he loved me and he—” Ben screwed his eyes shut and choked down an anvil-sized lump in his throat, “—and he never stopped.”

When he opened his eyes again, she was there in front of him. This time, he didn’t flinch when she took his hand in hers. “Do you believe him now?”

“I’m getting there,” Ben whispered, and it felt like admitting to nothing and to everything all at once.

Leia’s nod in response told him that it was enough—that he’d said what she’d longed to hear—and as she gave his hand an ever-so-slight squeeze, a tinny trilling noise rang out from her pocket. Letting him go, she fished out her comm unit, frowned at the screen, and muttered under her breath, “Kriffing senator for Nishr.” She glanced up, her eyes searching his for any of the tell-tale flickers of a lie that had always betrayed him when he’d been a boy. “Nishr wants me to holocall them as soon as I can. Will you be all right here if I leave? If you need me, all you need to do is reach for me and I’ll come running.”

Ben’s mind insisted the opposite, that he wouldn’t be  _all right_ or anywhere close, but he nodded all the same. “If you see Luke,” he said, “tell him that I want to talk to Rey. If she’ll listen.”

“I think she will,” Leia replied with a hint of a smile, turning and pushing a button just beside the door to open it. She pressed the room’s keycard into his palms, and then she was gone, leaving him alone in his too-comfortable-for-a-monster quarters with the warm bed and its cosy quilt, the plentiful bars of soap in the ‘fresher, and the gentle glow of light filtering in through the window.

With nobody else to fill it but himself, the room felt impossibly big, as though it would expand and keep growing until it swallowed him whole if he didn’t try to distract himself with  _something._ Out of curiosity, not expecting anything other than emptiness, Ben pulled open the wardrobe’s doors.

What he saw inside made him take a step back in astonishment.

They’d given him  _clothes._

They were simple garments, but far, far too nice for him nonetheless. Ben examined them with the utmost care, his fingers trembling as he skimmed them over each item: one by one, he discovered a black vest not unlike something his father might have worn in his youth, a soft charcoal-grey jacket, a set of crisp white button-down shirts, pairs of sharply-ironed black trousers, and a woollen cape that resembled a newer version of the gift he’d received for his thirteenth birthday. The old, tattered cape had been folded up and placed in a drawer, alongside vast amounts of cable-knit socks and a selection of underwear and even nightclothes, and atop the drawer rested a pair of shiny boots with no scuffs or frays in the laces. Not a single piece was a hand-me-down, donated by or salvaged from some stranger who happened to be around his size—they’d all been picked out for  _him._

 _I won’t ever deserve this,_ Ben thought, jerking away from the wardrobe as if scalded, the momentary urge to lash out and reduce everything to rubble and shreds of fabric sparking beneath his skin and then fading.  _Any of it._ Numbly, he staggered backwards until he bumped against the edge of the bed and sagged onto it like a snapping branch, his head finding its way into his hands and his fingers to the roots of his hair, where they tightened into fists.

He gave himself about a minute to stay like that, like a prisoner who’d just been sentenced to death and not a man who’d been spared and given life instead, before he clenched his jaw, evened out his breathing, untangled his hands from his hair, and made himself sit up. If Anakin Skywalker was watching him now, what would he think of him? Could he still not see his grandfather’s ghost because he was too disappointed in him to appear for him, or—Ben sensed himself spiralling and tried to steer back towards rationality—was he unable to, as long as Snoke remained alive?

One thing, at least, was clear. She wanted nothing to do with him or his name, but without her knowing that he was behind it, Anakin had let Leia see Padmé in her dreams. And if he could do that, Ben wondered, the bright, fragile beginnings of hope blossoming in his heart, could he allow her to speak to Han, even if it was only for a few moments?

 

* * *

 

Sunlight spilled like water through the canopy of leaves and dappled Rey’s skin, warming her to the bone and casting Luke’s hair in the silvery-white shine of a cloud’s lining. She’d never admit it to him, knowing that it might sound strange, but the forest clearing in which they sat felt like a sanctuary— _her_ sanctuary.

The whole forest was a Force nexus, from the winding woodland path that led there to the feet of the snow-capped mountains several klicks away, each stretching tall enough to make her dizzy. Rey loved that she could feel the woods in her very blood, as much a part of her as her fingers or her toes, and some days, when she wanted to be alone for an hour or so, she’d crouch in the shade of an ancient tree and listen to the nearby lake’s musical babbling, or the singing of the little birds she’d learned to identify by their calls. She’d slip off her boots and sit barefoot amongst a carpet of fragrant pine needles, glowing gorsa petals, and all the native flowers: bluebell sprigs, cheerful pink-tipped daisies the size of her thumb, sweet-smelling velanies, lofty foxgloves, and rainbows of centaureas.

“How do you feel about training with Ben from now on?” Luke asked out of the blue, uncrossing his legs from his meditation position. Rey furrowed her brows at him, and as if anticipating her reply— _you’re my master; you could just_ tell  _me that Ben’s going to be my partner and that’d be the end of it—_ he held up his flesh-and-blood hand and added, “Please, don’t feel like you’re being pressured. You can say no, if you want to, and I’ll figure something else out.”

If Luke had asked her a month ago, before her meadow-dream and before Ren—no,  _Ben,_ not  _Ren—_ had risked his life to save Leia, Rey would have burst out with an appalled  _no_ before he could finish his sentence. Her answer wouldn’t have mattered much; then, Ben had been thousands of light-years away from her, and the possibility of him ever coming home had been just as distant. Now, he was only a short walk away, and so she had to pause and think for a while. She frowned and ducked her head, her fingers drifting to the ground to rip out a clump of grass, which she absently shredded blade by blade until a ragged pile built up on her lap.

All day, as she’d tried with all her might to cling on to what she remembered of her dream of the day-wolf and the night-wolf and the soft-voiced storyteller who’d felt like a mother, a confusing rush of Ben’s emotions had poured into her through the threads that bound her to him. Grief, at first, so potent that it burned in her own eyes, snuffed out like a candle by a man who deemed himself unworthy of feeling it, and then a buffeting cocktail of love and regret that sent her head spinning and her fists clenching to mirror his. When she’d let her eyes fall shut to meditate, doing her best to pretend to be perfectly still and calm, she’d  _sensed_ what had upset him so much in fleeting, comet-quick flashes.

The flow of fabric between her fingertips. The scent of soaps and clean laundry, overpowering the forest’s smell of grass and flowers and earth for a moment. He’d been given his own quarters, and it had knocked him reeling, just as it had her. Their circumstances were different, and he’d once known comfort—years ago, he must have had a snug bed to curl up in, whatever food his heart desired, and perhaps even an actual bathtub—but she’d thought the same after she’d arrived on Alinor and been shown to her new room:  _how can any of this be mine?_

At last, Rey released a long, heavy exhale. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

Luke smiled, wide and true. “I hoped you’d say that.” He then focused his bright gaze on her, studying her with one of his  _looks—_ one of those that made her feel as though he could see past her surface, into the core of her. Would he like what he saw there, she wondered, or would it unnerve him? “Ben’s asked to talk to you, and I think we both know what it’s about.” Immediately, Rey’s heart skipped a beat, her pulse dancing in her temples and against her ribs: after months of imagining and yearning, she’d  _finally_ be getting her memories back. “Before that,” Luke continued, lines of worry creasing his forehead, “is everything all right? Earlier, on the way home from Elan, you seemed unlike yourself. If there’s something bothering you, you can talk to me; I wouldn’t want for you to have to bottle it up.”

Rey chewed her lip and averted her eyes from his, stalling for time by dusting the torn-up bits of grass from her lap. How could she ever hope to find the words to describe the heartsick weight that had settled in her chest and never left, once she’d woken up and discovered that she was alone in an unfamiliar bed, and not safe in the arms of somebody who’d called her their  _star-child_ and loved her with every inch of their being?

Frustrated with herself, she experimented, stringing together sentences in her mind and rearranging them when they didn’t sound quite right.

Nothing fit.

Explaining that she’d dreamed of fresh-baked bread, ocean spray, and twinkling windchimes, but had opened her eyes to the droning hum of a ship racing through hyperspace—that came nowhere close to expressing the full-body sense of  _loss_ that had bent her double and forced her to grit her teeth against the tears stinging her eyes. Nor did telling him that she’d jolted awake, as if doused with a bucketful of cold water, and had to question whether anything was real, or if she’d been desperate enough to invent it all. And she wouldn’t say that for the span of a dream, she’d had a place to belong, because she  _did_ have somewhere.

Except Alinor wasn’t entirely hers, and reminded her of that fact whenever she saw parents embracing their embarrassed older children, or siblings arguing with no genuine venom polluting their voices, or tight-knit families grouped around a table in the cafeteria, their chatter and laughter bouncing off the walls. She didn’t have  _answers._

“I’ve… been having dreams,” Rey began slowly. “Do you remember months ago, on Ahch-To? When I told you that I’d started to think of things that felt like I might have known them once—chiming bells, silver blossoms, soft voices, the smell of the sea?” She waited for Luke to nod, then dragged in a deep breath and went on, “That’s what I’m dreaming of now, but they’re much clearer than they used to be. When I fell asleep on the  _Starbird,_ I had a dream that felt so real, I woke up feeling like I’d actually lost something. Someplace. Some _one.”_

Luke tilted his head to the side as though considering what she’d said, and any other day, if they’d been discussing anything else, she wouldn’t have been able to stand the sympathy that curved down the corners of his mouth. “What happened in the dream?” he asked at length.

It felt childish now, to tell him that she’d been cocooned up, listening to a fairy-story about wolf cubs who’d loved the sun, the moon, and the stars so much that they’d climbed to live amongst them, their fur coats glimmering with star-glow and sunglare as they met once more in the silvery light of dawn and dusk. In the end, Rey settled for saying, “Somebody was telling me a story, though it wasn’t one that I’d ever heard before. A folktale, about…” She shook her head, all of a sudden thinking better of it. That part, at least, ought to stay hers to keep. “I heard the bells again, and the speaker… I was very young, and they—they felt like a mother. Like they loved me.” Her throat jammed up, and she glanced down at the ground, counting the leaves on a patch of clovers so that Luke wouldn’t see the colour rising in her cheeks.

“Oh, Rey,” he murmured. “I wish there was something I could do to help you find out where you’re dreaming of, who your family is, and if they’re—” He caught himself and cut himself off before he could give voice to the words—the possibility—she feared:  _if they’re still alive._ If she were to pay any mind to that Jakkuvian superstition about things spoken aloud, she’d worry that him saying it would jinx it, somehow, and  _make_ them dead, swallowed up in a haze of smoke and flames that had failed to take her, too. “Who it was that left you with me.”

“You don’t think I’m just imagining everything?”

“Not at all,” Luke replied, almost as soon as the words had left her mouth. He paused, his cybernetic fingers drumming against the back of his other hand, and when he spoke again, it was with particular care. “The thing about visions is that they’re always changing: they can be accurate, but they can also never come to pass, so what you  _expect_ to happen might not. But dreams… well, often, they come from inside us, from our experiences and fears and hopes, formed somewhere we can’t access while we’re awake. Vivid dreams, especially ones that you’ve been having for so long, could well be drawing from real, buried memories.”

“I  _want_ them to be real,” Rey told him, her voice rough and raw-edged, “more than anything.”

Having that little piece of  _home—_ a connection to her family, whoever they were, whatever happened in the fire—would mean more than the galaxy to her. Even if her parents were dead, and she couldn’t have them anymore, she wanted to know their faces. If they’d had freckles like hers, scattered like stardust over their cheeks and noses. The colours of their eyes, and if she’d inherited the green-gold flecks in her own from one of them; the sound of their laughter; the shape of their smiles, and whether hers was similar; and their names, both first and last. What they might have named her, if she wasn’t truly  _Rey_ at all.

With a small, sad half-smile of understanding, Luke leaned over and gave her hand a tentative  _hey, Just Rey, I’m here_ kind of squeeze. The warmth of it, and the memory of standing with him at the cliffside on Ahch-To, where he’d shared the stories of his parents that he’d once invented as a boy growing up on Tatooine, was enough to make her steel herself and inhale until she sat up straight. He pretended not to notice her sniffing and furiously blinking away tears, and allowed her to dab at her eyes with her sleeve before he asked, “Are you ready to speak to Ben?”

At Rey’s nod—she was sure that if she tried to answer him by using her voice, the lump in her throat would tighten and strangle it hoarse—Luke shut his eyes, no doubt reaching out for his nephew in the Force, pulling on the silver string that was Ben and Kylo Ren and everything in between. She waited without daring to move an inch, her heartbeats coming in quicker and louder thumps, as if they’d taken it upon themselves to count down to the moment he emerged from the thickets.

A full minute before she heard twigs snapping underfoot and the whispering  _swish-swish_ of a person trampling through tall grass, the flit of a shiver up the column of her spine and the curious sensation that a part deep inside of somebody else was calling out to a matching part of her—which was  _searching,_ seeking in return—told her that Ben was nearby.

She felt the icy shards of his pent-up anxiety spiking through her stomach before she saw him appearing out of a gap in the trees, trudging towards them through a sea of woodland flowers and scattered gorsa blossoms. He carried himself with his bare fists clenched at his sides, his head lowered, and his shoulders hunched inwards, as though he were trying in vain to minimise his form. At some point, he’d changed out of his layers upon layers of black clothes, and without them, Rey realised with an odd twinge behind her ribs, he looked like he could be somebody else. Not just anybody—no matter what, she’d always recognise him as Ben Organa—but a Ben that never was.

In his grey jacket, white shirt, black trousers, and shiny, brand-new boots, he was a Ben who’d never had a chance to exist.

Luke greeted him with a breezy, “Hello, Ben,” as if the past fifteen years had never happened, and Ben shot back a jerky nod, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Plucking a fallen yellow leaf from his robes, Luke stood with a smile. “I’ll give you two some privacy, shall I?”

As soon as he’d left the clearing, leaving her and Ben alone in the space she’d always thought of as  _hers,_ Rey scrambled up. “Will you try to unblock my memories now?”

“I have to do this. For you.” Still holding himself with a level of tension that she’d expect from a cornered animal, Ben took a step closer to her, and when he did, his posture slackened by a hairsbreadth, the difference so slight that no other observer would have caught it. “I’ve never done this before,” he got out. “Given memories back, rather than sealing them away or erasing them altogether.” Hesitantly, hovering on the verge of another step, he asked, “Would you close your eyes?”

“Wait,” Rey blurted out, suddenly feeling much too vulnerable. “Is it—will it hurt?”

“No,” Ben hurried to reply. “There won’t be any pain, I promise. It—it might be overwhelming, but…”  _I won’t ever hurt you again, Rey_ hung as clear and soft as summer rain in the charged air between them, straddling some hidden boundary between the spoken and the unspoken.

“Okay.” Rey sucked in a fortifying breath. “Do it, then.”

Every other sense heightened tenfold once she closed her eyes. Not only did she feel each chittering forest creature’s thrumming heartbeat and the rustle of each little bird’s wings, but she felt  _Ben,_ too, his signature in the Force a swirling silver, the colour of the stars strung like pearls onto a night-wolf’s coat. She smelled sweet resin; cool, damp earth; the native flora, from the delicate scents of dozens of flowers to the wildness of rings of mushrooms and toadstools; and him—freshly-shampooed hair and what she couldn’t describe as anything else but  _winter,_ all snap-sharp cold and pine. She heard the crush of grass under the soles of his heavy boots as he advanced, slow and so very cautious, and then his intake of breath, an abrupt shudder of a sound.

His fingertips pressed against her forehead, his skin hotter than she’d imagined and his touch as light as feathers, and for a moment, Rey forgot how to breathe. The Force quavered around them, the bond  _sang,_ the golden tendrils of her being reached out to twine about his, and then she wasn’t in a flower-filled clearing on Alinor at all but—

_(—but somewhere else, a place straight from a dream. A lush field blanketed with thousands of tiny flowers, with a winding crystal-blue lake like an ink spill on a green canvas. She wove in between the legs of a group of tall padawans, all at least ten years older than her, laughing ringing-bright as she ran—_

_Master Luke passed her in the terracotta-and-white cafeteria, his hair a dirty golden-blonde and his face still unlined with worry. With a friendly wink and a hushing cybernetic finger over his lips, he levitated a small pastry onto her plate: a tart topped with fat sugar-drizzled cambylictus berries and enough vanilla cream to make her mouth water—_

_She shivered, her heart pounding so hard it hurt as she stepped into a room awash with dim lamplight and the rhythm of gentle snoring. Her fists were balled at her sides, and as though it had claws stuck in her, she could still smell the salt-spray mingling with burning wood that had clogged up her nose and throat and threatened to choke her in her nightmare. The sound of her footsteps against the tiles roused a messy-haired boy who squinted, propped himself up on his elbows, and curved his lips into a sluggish, half-awake smile._

_“Hey, Sunshine,” he whispered._

_“I had the fire dreams again,” Rey told him, her voice trembling._

_“C’mere.” The boy—a younger Ben who couldn’t have been a day older than thirteen, with unruly locks that failed miserably at hiding his ears—scooted over and lifted up the duvet so that she could wriggle underneath. “Not real,” he mumbled as she settled down beside him, his tongue thick and clunky from sleep._

_She turned to face the lamp on his bedside table and willed as many pleasant dreams as she could conjure up into her head, letting herself be lulled drowsy by the easy breathing of the other boys all around her. Ben lay on the opposite side, curled up like a cat, and her ice-chilled feet must have been freezing his calves through his nightclothes, though he didn’t wince or flinch or grumble_ quit it, you miniature monster,  _but instead quietly dissolved into snores as she, too, slipped off into sleep, safe now—_

 _It was way past midnight, and she’d had the nightmares again; they’d yanked her awake and sent her hurtling down the corridors to the archives, where she just_ knew  _she’d find Ben. Rey leaned against him and draped his arm over her shoulders as he hunched over, his back pushed against a shelf, reading a book that—despite her valiant attempts—was packed with words too long for her to understand. She probed him on what a_ Barsen’thor  _was, and called his book with its too-big words and too few fights_ boring,  _and when Master Luke walked in, crouched before them, and produced the most beautiful flower she’d ever seen from the pocket of his robes, she gasped—_

_Hundreds upon hundreds of memories flurried before her eyes, blurring into a kaleidoscope of hues and sounds._

_Ben, his black eyebrows lowered in concentration as he showed her the correct way to hold a wooden stick for a lightsaber, coaching her through the opening stance for Shii-Cho while she beamed, brimming with excitement to one day become a proper Jedi._

_Ben kneeling behind her as she sat cross-legged, clamping an elastic tie between his lips and styling her hair into the three buns that she’d insisted on wearing. Her hair tangled into knots at the drop of a hat—she’d have been surprised if it didn’t; she never stayed still for long—and he was always so gentle with her, never once making her hiss or cry out when he came across a snarl that had to be coaxed free. In return, he allowed her to fumble about with his mane of curls without a single complaint, not even when she picked handfuls of daisies, dandelions, and buttercups and plaited them into the inky strands._

_An azure-skinned Twi’lek with lekku that skimmed her hips teaching Rey a few words from her native language, and Rey’s eyes going saucer-round in amazement as she demonstrated how a Twi’lek could cross over both lek to say_ I love you  _without needing any words at all. A broad teenager with a shock of copper-red hair suggesting that they ought to teach her how to curse in Huttese, just to see how Master Luke would react, and somebody giving him a light-hearted whack on the arm, laughing and saying, “You can’t go around teaching innocent four-year-olds how to tell someone that their mother was a—”_

_Proud birds with orange bills and snowy feathers sailing across the lake, rearing up and flapping their huge white wings to warn her away if she dared come too close. Swarms of butterflies bursting from the branches of a phosphorescent lumas tree by nightfall and fluttering high enough to graze the moon. Swollen purple cambylictus berries piled in her cupped hands, their juices smeared around her mouth and dripping from her fingertips._

_Prisms of light dancing on the stone ground as Master Luke, surrounded by a ring of holocrons that circled and bobbed around him, let her perch on his desk and swing her legs while he studied a set of ancient Jedi texts._

_One of the eldest padawans practising braids on her, weaving flowers and multicoloured ribbons into her hair until she looked like a princess from an old fairy tale._

_Ben, who scowled more and more as he grew up—though rarely at her, as if he were keeping his smiles saved up just for her—and his rhymes and songs and stories that had once belonged to a long-dead planet. Tales of kidnapped princes spirited away in the deepest, darkest of nights, rescued at last by brave adventurer girls, and ballads about fierce warrior queens, who faced down entire armies and sacrificed themselves so that their children could reach a safe haven. He sang that one as though it wouldn’t have been out of place at a funeral, all bittersweet and solemn, but for whatever reason, Rey liked it best of all._

_“Are_ you  _a prince, Ben?”_

_“Um,” Ben replied, ever the elegant. “I suppose. But it’s in name only. There’s no more Alderaan, so…”_

_“That’s all right,” Rey said. “You’re a real prince, and if you get captured like the prince in that story, I’ll be the one who saves you from the evil sorcerer’s tower.”_

_“You?” Ben laughed, sweeping her up and onto his shoulders. Over her squeals of joy, he teased, “You hardly reach my waist. What are you going to do, gnaw on his ankles until he gives me up?”_

_“Yes!”_

_Then—fire like something out of her nightmares brought to life, burning away those fleeting images of a happy, rosy-cheeked Rey astride Ben’s shoulders. A haze of confusion and panic bled into the air, so thick that she had to wade through it, stumbling through smoke too black and dense for her to see beyond her own feet, her coughing drowned out by the sounds of roaring flames, cracking wooden beams, and shouting._

_Out of nowhere, a masked figure seized her, their harsh grip digging bruises into her skinny arm. She screamed her throat raw and fought to get free, kicking and scratching wherever she could, but they ignored her, asking what to do with her like she wasn’t even there. Another padawan—Nyla, Rey remembered—suggested that they kill her, as casually as if she were casting off an unwanted item of clothing. When Ben emerged from the curtain of smoke and promised to deal with her, Nyla and the others left, though not before calling out a reminder that_ the Supreme Leader is waiting,  _and Rey watched them go, desperate to cry out a tear-choked_ where are you going what did I do why don’t you want me—

_Ben scooped her up, smelling of yet more smoke. “Wait, Sunshine, please, wait.”_

_At that, he put her down, turned on his heels, and disappeared into the Praxeum, her only home going up in flames. She couldn’t tell for sure, but the fire seemed to die down, just enough to look deliberate; enough to stop it from eating its way through the building. In a matter of moments, Ben sprinted back to her, clutching his music box with the luminous little moon inside and his sunblaze meditation beads like drops of crystallised honey, which he always ran through his fingers when trying to calm himself._

_Without speaking, he ushered her onto a ship. His face was blank and drawn, his eyes were wet and hollow, and when she tugged on his ash-coated sleeves and demanded to know what was going on, he didn’t respond. All he did was give the slightest shake of his head and make the jump to hyperspace, his hands juddering on the dashboard controls._

_Endless expanses of sand loomed up out of the viewport, shaped into dunes ridged like a dragon’s scales from so far away, and Ben slid out of his seat and knelt to be level with her on the co-pilot’s chair. His hands hung useless at his sides, as though he wanted so badly to take hers in his and hold them tight, but wouldn’t—_ couldn’t— _allow himself._

 _“I’m sorry; I should have been stronger—” His voice broke, hitching on a not-quite-quelled sob as he helped her up and down the ship’s ramp, towards a squat, run-down outpost with a sign reading_ Niima,  _etched in a sloping scrawl. She’d seen him weep before, and he’d witnessed several of her tantrums, but she’d never known him to look and sound so shattered. “I couldn’t let them hurt you; not now, not ever. You’ll be safe here, I’ll make sure of it. We won’t see each other again, and you won’t remember me after… after this. But my name was Ben, and I cared for you so, so very much. So did—does—Luke.” Ben glanced back at a large Crolute behind a concession stand, took a steadying, stuttering breath, and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Your name is Rey,” he said with renewed conviction. “You aren’t from here, but you think Luke Skywalker is only a myth, and you’ve never met me, or been to Nysa, or heard much of the Force…”_

 _When he’d finished, Rey’s mind was an odd whirl, her memories slipping from her grasp and shutting themselves away until she’d forgotten that she was meant to have them at all. She blinked up at the strange boy stepping away from her, puzzling at his glistening, red-rimmed eyes and his trembling mouth._ Who are you,  _she wanted to ask—)_

—and then, in the time between one heartbeat and another, she’d fast-forwarded fifteen years and returned to Alinor, where she stood in the forest clearing with its myriad flowers and streams of afternoon sunlight drizzling through the gaps in the canopy of leaves.

Ben pulled away as soon as they came back to themselves, his hand still outstretched like an unspoken thought, his dark eyes glassy and haunted. He was close enough that she could see her reflection in them: she’d frozen, and her mouth was half-open, as if caught on a breath or a cry.

“You called me ‘Sunshine’,” Rey whispered with a minuscule shake of her head. She took another moment to regain her bearings and ground herself in her own body, then she set her jaw and made herself ask a question to which she didn’t know if she truly wanted the answer: “How often did you think of me?” It came out reedy and weak, too fragile for a girl who’d never had the chance to be fragile, and so she swallowed hard and tried again. “Did you ever wonder what might have happened to me?”  _If Plutt kept to his word and found me a home and a family, or if he shrugged off that deal like he has so many others and left me to rot?_

“Some part of me knew that it was you when I received reports of a girl stealing a freighter from Jakku,” Ben replied, lowering his hand. He flexed it at his side, and then added, “There was… there was only one person it  _could_ have been, and yet, I hoped. It would have been treasonous for me to think such things, but I hoped that it was you, and that I’d get to see you again.”

“You know, after I heard about the past from Luke,” Rey started, her voice all bent out of shape by a stubborn quaver that wouldn’t go away, “I sometimes thought about you and what you’d done. I wanted to show you what it was like on Jakku and really make you see it: what you believed you’d given me—love and shelter and more food than I’d ever be able to eat at once—and what I actually got. Scraps; a toppled, booby-trapped AT-AT; and Unkar Plutt giving me less than I’d earned just for the fun of it.”

“I saw it in your dreams,” Ben told her, softer now.  _Pained,_ almost.

Rey pushed on regardless. “I wanted to show you what it was like to  _want._ To want with your whole heart but never, ever get.”

“You think I don’t know how that feels?” Ben took a step backwards, his voice climbing in volume. At the sudden burst of noise, a small bird pecking around a patch of velanies startled and flew away, and several others followed, surging from their perches in the trees in a rush of beating wings and shivering leaves. “To want to give in to the Light that always, always calls to you? To want nothing more than to go home, but to believe—no,  _know—_ that you gave up that chance when you were just a stupid boy? To want to take your father up on his offer to leave behind everything that you’ve known for the past decade-and-a-half, but knowing that you  _can’t_ and that you have to—you have to—” He stopped mid-sentence, disgust at himself twisting his full mouth and turning her stomach through the bond.

It might have ended there, had Rey’s repressed emotions—the ones she kept hidden from Luke and all of her friends, refusing to allow them anything but the tiniest of glimpses—not boiled over and out of her, leading her to break the silence with a shout even louder, even more raw, than his.

“To want something as simple as to see what your parents  _look_ like, but knowing that in all likelihood, despite the hope you’ve been trying to hang on to, something terrible happened and they’re probably  _dead?”_ A split-second after the sharp words speared from her lips, she clapped her hands over her mouth as though trying to contain any more, then wavered and sank to her knees. “I never meant to say that,” Rey choked out, her heart so heavy that she wondered if her ribs would be able to hold it without shattering. All anger left Ben in an instant, and though she expected him to walk away and leave her behind to sob alone, he dropped down to her level. “I want to believe that they’re alive,” she mumbled to the ground, “but… it’s been years… and I—I keep seeing fire…”

Still kneeling, Ben frowned and reached for her hand. At the last minute, not daring to touch her, his arm fell limp, his fingers curling straight into a white-knuckled fist. “I’m sorry,” he said instead, quiet enough to be lost as the leaves sighed against the wind. “You deserved more. So much more.” He was trying to lock himself away, but his thoughts disobeyed him, cascading out into the air around them:  _do something, you idiot_ and  _please let her family be out there somewhere, please let her have that_ and  _selfish cruel man, cursing your own childhood when at least you can remember your parents and where you were born—_

“I’m sorry as well,” Rey replied weakly, wiping at her eyes with a bit of her sleeve. She tried to make herself flash him a quick smile, but the act seemed almost impossible, as if just admitting her fears aloud had stolen all the smiles from her. “You deserved more, too, so I guess we’re even.”

“I made my own choices,” Ben insisted in return, his voice soft and stubborn. “What’s done is done.”

“Snoke began talking to you when you were only a baby, didn’t he, Ben?” she asked, remembering her conversations with Luke and Leia, and what he’d said in their meadow-dream. He nodded, and with her tone filled with more passion than she’d intended, she continued, “We were  _both_ children. I don’t know what normal children are meant to worry about, but I  _do_ know that in no world should it ever be strange voices whispering to them, or whether—” she inhaled, forcing herself to say it no matter how much it ached, “—whether their parents have been killed. Whether they were there to watch their family die.”

Ben glanced away, his Adam’s apple bobbing with a swallow. It looked like it was taking everything he had not to go to her and try to comfort her as he would have when they were young—one arm around her, pulling her in and letting her lean close, a gentle hand rubbing calming circles on her back until she stopped weeping.  _Just like my mom used to do,_ he’d once murmured to her, the memory now so clear and bright,  _and if I ever cried myself out and fell asleep, I’d wake up to find myself tucked up in my bed, safe and warm._

Finally, he gritted out, “I was fourteen years old when I lowered the shields protecting Nysa, let in Snoke’s men, stole the ability to use the Force from every padawan who refused to join me, and abandoned you on Jakku with Unkar Plutt. I was old enough to know better.” He drew in a deep breath, then added a half-strangled, “I ought to have been able to resist him.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Rey said. “Been able to resist him, that is.”

His gaze whipped back around to her. “Of course you would.”

 _“No.”_ Rey shook her head, and was almost startled to see his eyes settle on hers, this time unflinching. The light had changed him in ways so subtle that she had to pause for a moment just to look: in the sunglow, his eyes were less sad, more alight with rich honey and warm flecks of hazel. “I thought about you as we flew home from Elan,” she told him, “and I realised that for you to turn, Snoke must have promised to give you something that you desperately wanted—not power, but acceptance, or maybe even some kind of love. And I knew that if he’d promised me the same thing, if he’d spoken to me from that age, I’d have gone to him, too.”

“Does it not make you feel weak to admit that?” Ben asked, cocking his head. There was no malice in it, only genuine curiosity, as though he couldn’t fathom  _not_ hating himself for possessing the slightest flaw, however understandable. Had Snoke moulded him to think like that, beating him down over years and years until perfection felt as vital as breathing, or had he always been unable to stand any perceived hint of failure in himself?

“If anything, it makes me feel stronger,” she answered at once, suppressing what was nearly a smile at the furrow pulling between his dark brows. “Like I know who I am. Once,” she went on, finding that she wanted to keep talking to him, “I was scrubbing the scraps I’d managed to salvage from a wreck when, out of nowhere, a woman started talking to me. She was no more than chest-height on me and probably older than the wreck itself, and in the creakiest voice imaginable, she told me that you should know and accept your weaknesses. If you do, she said, nobody will ever be able to use them against you.”

Though Ben didn’t reply, some of the tension that he’d been holding in his frame loosened, and the silver of him in the Force became as soft as moonlight, rippling with each of his slow, thudding heartbeats. It was a level of close-to-peacefulness she’d never seen from him before, and as if sensing it, the birds that had fled at their raised voices began to flit back down to the ground with wink-quick flutters of their wings and cautious little hops.

She’d learned all their names from the encyclopaedia of the galaxy’s flora and fauna that Finn had given to her for her birthday, and from Luke, who knew the woods as well as he did himself. About a metre or so away were a group of wrens with round, speckled bodies like puffballs atop spindly brown legs; two fat magpies, one teasing a worm from out of the dirt, the other flicking its glossy tail in impatience; and a tufted cardinal, cloaked in crimson with rust-coloured wings.

Rey watched a tiny red-breasted robin bob as it walked towards them, tilting its head this way and that to examine them with a pair of beady black eyes. Careful not to move too hastily or to make too much noise, she stood and plucked a few plump wine-red candleberries from a bush at the outskirts of the clearing, then knelt.

It had taken a while for her to get to a point where she could feed a bird. The first time she’d done it, under Luke’s encouraging eye, she’d bated her breath and outstretched her berry-laden palm to a curious starling, and tried not to gasp with glee when it pecked its prize straight from her.  _I’ve only just learned what it’s like to go without feeling hungry,_ she’d thought, beaming as the starling came back for seconds,  _but here I am, feeding something else._ On Jakku, if she’d come across a flock of wild birds, she’d have considered snaring them for a meal. Here, light-years away from that life, where she could almost forget the dizzying ache of going without food for days, there was no need.

“We train here all the time, and I’m used to it now,” she told Ben, “but I used to look at these birds while we worked and think about how I might have eaten them, if I’d had the chance.”

Ben eyed the birds amongst them, perhaps trying to imagine himself as her, sore-bellied and ready with an armful of the traps that she’d often used to catch bloggins. Regret seemed to shrink him, starting from his centre, hollowing him out and dimming the spark in him for a moment, until after a long silence, he said, “They’re very small. Hard to catch, and not much meat for the effort.”

“Right,” Rey agreed, nodding. “You saw earlier: aside from me and Luke, they’re not often around people, so they’re quite skittish. They’ll fly away if you’re too noisy, but they’ll let you feed them if you’re quiet, patient, and try not to make any sudden movements, like this.” She evened out her breathing and ever so slowly held out one candleberry between her thumb and forefinger. Once she had the robin’s attention, she made the whistle that Luke had taught her, and the little bird hopped up to her, appraised her, and with a high-pitched, musical trill, took the berry from her. Grinning in triumph, she watched it flutter back to eat. “You should see Luke,” she added with real fondness. “He can get them to perch on his shoulder and eat from the palm of his hand, but I think I’m still winning their trust.”

 _Like you’re winning mine, somehow,_ Rey thought to herself, biting her lower lip and stealing a private glance back at him. Almost immediately, she had to dart her gaze away: the tips of his ears, which poked out from between his windswept waves of hair, had gone pink, and he was looking at her with— _admiration,_ she realised, feeling her cheeks heat up. Until now, the last time he’d seen her so much as smile had been on Nysa; he’d never seen her grin before, not in this lifetime.

 _I just wanted you to understand._ Shrouding her mind as best as she could, she focused on the two magpies now bickering over the worm, determined not to face him.  _And I think you do. I’m trying to understand you, too. We’re both as lost as each other, aren’t we?_

A rustle of grass and dead leaves beside her distracted her from her thoughts. She turned to find Ben climbing up, making his way towards the candleberry bush, and picking a handful of ripe red fruits with such gentle care that for a moment, she couldn’t see anything in him of the black-clad warrior who’d fought her in the snow on Starkiller Base, nor the man who’d duelled her on Heorot and Boreas. He sat back down, rearranged his long, strong-looking legs underneath him, then tentatively outstretched a hand and let out a lower imitation of her whistle.

Within seconds, a wren took notice, and skipped up to peck a berry right from his hand. If it was at all afraid of him, it didn’t show it, though his palm was so large in comparison to such a tiny bird, he could have scooped it up and wrapped his fingers around it, and not a hint of its beak or downy tail-feathers would have peeked out. As he watched it hurry back to its fellows, carrying the berry like a hard-won trophy, something changed in his expression, something softer and painfully human. It made Rey feel odd inside, as though she’d witnessed the sharing of a secret—like Ben had just had a burning question of his answered, and all she could do was guess at what it was.

Maybe he’d wanted to know  _am I a monster,_ or maybe he’d asked  _am I truly so cruel and beyond saving?_ By the look on his face, the answer was a resounding  _no._

Unable to shake the creeping sensation of eavesdropping on something personal, Rey leapt up and brushed a few stray blades of grass from her knees. “I’m going to go and find my friends now,” she said, coating her voice in false breeziness. “But—thank you for my memories. It was nice meeting you again, Ben.”

“You don’t need to thank me for anything.” Ben frowned at her. “Everything that I’ve done so far has been the bare minimum,” he added, much quieter. “Less than that, even. I might as well be thanking you for not punching me square in the face.”

“Don’t count your blessings too soon; Luke might decide that he wants us to spar,” she warned him.  _Would we have sparred together at the Praxeum?_ she wondered. As a thirteen-year-old, once she’d passed her Initiate Trials, she’d have become eligible for Ben to choose her as his padawan, if he’d wanted.

 _(“You’d_ better  _pick me, Benny, when it’s time.”_

 _Ben’s eyebrows knit in confusion, as if he hadn’t entertained the thought of choosing anybody else to be his future padawan. “How could I not?” he asked, giving her his wide, crooked-toothed grin. “Though I know what_ you’re  _like, Sunshine. You’ll tire me out and I’ll end up with a grey streak in my hair by the time I’m thirty.”)_

His lips twitched up at the corners. It was almost— _almost—_ a smile. “I look forward to it.” When she turned and made to walk away, he called, “Rey?”

Rey spun back around, and couldn’t help but start at the sight of him holding out his palmful of berries once more, the two fat magpies chittering in excitement as they raced towards him. “Yeah?” she managed at last.

“Thank you.”

She smiled.

 

* * *

 

Leia’s eyes stung sore with exhaustion as she uncoiled her crown braid and, stifling a yawn, took one final scroll through her datapad to make sure that nothing else—or  _nobody_ else, the likelier option—required her attention.

After she’d ended her holocall with the senator for Nishr, who she suspected preferred hearing the sound of his own voice to any actual response, she and several higher-ups of the Resistance had passed on Ben’s intel to most of the senators for the Core Worlds. She’d spoken through gritted teeth and with steel backing every word, but it hadn’t been enough. Arkanis’ senator—a friend of the late Brendol Hux, the father of the current fresh-faced and cold-eyed General of the First Order—had vacated his post not long after he’d been discovered. Though a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and that of the senator for Comra, both had simply disappeared without a trace.

 _It’s not as if they were particularly likeable people, or even good politicians,_ she thought, brewing herself a cup of steaming hot caf and stirring in two extra teaspoonfuls of sugar, the way she’d liked it best since she’d been a little girl, all muddy dress hems and skinned knees.  _Arkanis was so much of a snob, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the wind changed and his nose got stuck tilted up in the air, and Comra… well, he didn’t give a damn about anything unless he could declare war on it._

The sick, angry pain of the betrayal roiled in her belly and blanched her knuckles. Arkanis and Comra had attended meetings and looked each of them in the eye, knowing that the First Order would have had all of them dead, if they could. They’d sat amongst everybody, talking like a group of old friends, and still they’d supported the organisation that had murdered so many of their fellows and billions of innocents in the Hosnian system. Korr Sella had been  _killed_ that day, and Arkanis had even reached out to Leia and offered condolences. She wanted to seize them by their lapels and scream  _how could you,_ or force them in front of one of the many dozens of towering, glittering memorials spread across the galaxy and demand  _don’t you know what they did?_

As soon as she raised the cup of caf to her lips, she felt it.

Though she was no Jedi—and had never once wavered in her refusal to be trained—she knew the ebbs and flows of the Force like she knew the steady marching beat of her own heart. For somebody who’d grown up with the feel of it, it was predictable in how it eddied, flurried, and streamed all around her, humming at the tips of her fingers and vibrating in her bones whenever she called for it. Now, however, it was charged like the air before a lightning strike, ricocheting off an energy that ought not to be there, not if she was alone in her office—and she  _was;_ she’d locked the door herself.

Somebody was in the room with her. Somebody warm, who smelled of things so familiar that it hurt, of woodsmoke and nerf-leather and starship fuel and  _home—_

Turning around, Leia had to grip her desk with both trembling hands to keep herself from falling backwards. Her mouth shaped a  _Han?_ but only a cracked whisper came out.

Until Luke had spoken of it, she’d thought it impossible, and even then, some part of her had found it hard to believe. When Jedi died, they could return as ghosts at will, but ordinary people—Bails and Brehas and Korr Sellas; Alderaanians and Hosnians—were just lost forever. And yet there Han was in the centre of her office, his frame ethereal and limned in light, the corners of his eyes unlined with age, and on his face a brilliant grin that could have put the sun to shame.

“Hey, sweetheart.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! From Ben to Rey: her childhood memories and a listening ear. From Rey to Ben: some gentleness and understanding. From me to you: actual Reylo physical contact (if only brief) at last!
> 
> [Korr Sella](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Korr_Sella) first appeared as a young woman in _Bloodline,_ and became Leia's envoy between the Resistance and the New Republic. She was on Hosnian Prime attempting to deliver a warning to the Republic when Starkiller Base was fired. Leia's lost so much, both in-canon and in this fic, and _The Last Jedi_ made me feel for her all the more.
> 
> [Twi'leki,](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Twi%27leki) or Ryl, is a language consisting of a mixture of verbal sounds and sign language using a Twi'lek's head-tails, also known as lekku.
> 
> Mentioning real-world animals in Star Wars fic felt odd to me until I learned that in the novelisation of _A New Hope_ , [Luke supposedly had a dog](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dog/Legends). Cardinals, chickens, owls, peacocks, and pigeons are referenced in various expanded universe materials, so I've just rolled with it and given myself free rein.
> 
> The old woman on Jakku who tells Rey to "know and accept your weaknesses" is inspired by Tyrion Lannister in _A Game of Thrones_ , who tells Jon Snow: ["Let me give you some counsel, bastard. Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you."](http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Feature_quote/83)
> 
> Lastly, the [Initiate Trials](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_Initiate_Trials) were a series of tests that Jedi younglings were subjected to in order to progress to the level of padawan. In the days of the Old Republic, there were three options open to a youngling once they'd passed their trials: to become a padawan; to serve in the Service Corps; and to leave the Order entirely and walk away in peace.


	8. Downpour

That night, as the world outside her window crept towards a pearly dawn, Rey’s dreams slipped through her fingers like rain. Before her very eyes, they blurred and shifted as if she were looking at them through a kaleidoscope, twisting until they weren’t her own.

Instead, she was _Ben,_ somehow, crammed into his too-big-yet-too-small body with its heart that ticked along to a slower beat than hers. Her field of view had the tell-tale faded edges of a memory that he’d tried and failed to bury, while the rest of it was filled with inky walls covered in climbing vines, each leaf and flower bud sprouting from them shrivelled to a paper-thin husk that would surely crumble to dust at the slightest touch. Dark Side energy as thick and black as tar sunk into what little skin Ben had left exposed, and her limbs were alien things that wouldn’t move when she told them to, only when _he_ did, which made her fight all the more to force her eyes open.

It felt like the strangest imaginable invasion of his privacy, and for both their sakes, she didn’t want to have to see whatever happened here—whatever it was that he’d done or even, stars forbid, had done _to_ him that was awful enough to still haunt him in his sleep.

No matter how hard she tried to wake herself up, or to at least alter their surroundings—a meadow on Nysa like before, the forest clearing, her toppled AT-AT in Jakku’s dunes, _anywhere—_ she couldn’t stop Ben’s booted heels from scuffing against the cold stone ground with each step. He moved with extraordinary care, as though navigating a minefield: beneath him were spidery veins of gnarled, overgrown roots that could trip a man and cause him to shatter apart if he wasn’t careful. Several sets of slow footfalls rang off the walls as he walked like a hangman to the gallows, flanked by a silent group of masked, black-clad figures who had to be the Knights of Ren, all of them oblivious to the irregular rhythm of his breathing and the queasiness simmering in the pit of his stomach.

At the end of the shadowy hall, in front of a high-backed, jagged throne wreathed by yet more sprawling vines—these bearing cruel inch-long thorns—stood Snoke, draped in a trailing white robe. Fingers like fragments of old bone hung from his sleeves, and his smile as they approached distorted the ruined skin around his mouth into a grimace. A man knelt at his feet, his gaze fixed to the floor, his hair a snarled tangle, and his roughspun clothes frayed and stained with a week’s worth of grime. He didn’t even try to glance up when Ben and the Knights lowered themselves to one knee before Snoke, and from what she could see of his face, Rey realised with a sick swoop in her gut, he had the rounded, still-soft features of a person not all the way out of their teens.

For a moment, as Snoke glided towards them, all she could hear was the whisper of his robe’s hem and the fight-or-flight _thud-thud-thud_ of her and Ben’s intertwined pulses. “You have done well, my boy,” he said with approval, his voice sweeping a winter-freeze chill down the length of her spine. Up close, he looked alarmingly fragile, and if the dream would let her—if she weren’t boxed into a nightmare-memory that Ben didn’t know how to change—she’d lurch forwards and snap him clean in half. “May I?” he asked, gesturing down to the lightsaber clipped into Ben’s belt.

Trying to keep Ben still or push a _no_ past his lips was no use: wordlessly, his hands wracked with a tremble that he couldn’t hide, he passed the weapon over. Snoke took it from him, inspecting it, turning it this way and that, and she felt Ben’s hope that it would be enough as if it were her own. When Snoke held the lightsaber away from himself and thumbed the activation button, her eyes seared as three blades shot out, as bright as wildfire against the darkness.

After what felt like an eternity, Snoke nodded. “It’s almost _perfect,_ child,” he said, flicking off the lightsaber. He made as if to return it, but as Ben reached for it, Snoke wrapped his hands around Ben’s before releasing him and laying it in his palms. His touch was clammy and far, far too icy to belong to a living being. “In adapting the design to accommodate your cracked crystal, you have created something useful from something broken. Through bleeding the crystal within and bending it to your will, you demonstrated your true power—though I never doubted it, not from an apprentice born of such a mighty pedigree.” It came out as an almost-purr, and a curl of disgust wormed through Rey’s gut: he spoke as though describing a purebred animal, and not the Ben she was growing to know. Sitting atop his throne and gripping the craggy armrests, he went on, “Impressed as I am, I have one final test for you.”

“Haven’t I already done everything you’ve asked of me?” she found herself—no, Ben—daring to say. A pang seized her by the throat and squeezed: he sounded so _young_ here, and just hours before, he’d given back her memories of him with that same voice, laughing with her and singing off-key Alderaanian ballads to her on Nysa. His heartbeat rattled a warning _shut-up-shut-up-shut-up_ that reverberated in both their skulls, but he carried on regardless, blurting out, “I—I destroyed the Praxeum and snuffed out an entire generation of would-be Jedi. I crafted my own lightsaber using a crystal I bled myself. What more would you have me do?”

“Your lightsaber, Kylo Ren,” Snoke replied, too quiet, “is untested. _Unbloodied._ A fine state for the training blade of a mere padawan, but not for a weapon belonging to an apprentice with as much potential as you.”

Awareness of what he wanted struck her like a bolt of lightning a half-second before it hit Ben, and then a wave of his horror crashed over her and knocked the air right out of her lungs. Frozen stiff all of a sudden, he dragged his eyes down to the boyish-faced youth still kneeling where Snoke had left him, perhaps scanning the dirt-smudged features and trying to work out how old he was: nineteen, Rey decided, would be too generous. _No,_ she thought, the word a plea to her own mind, _please let me wake up, please let Ben wake up—_

“This boy—” Snoke indicated the youth at the foot of his throne, the gesture almost lazy, “—was once an apprentice of mine, like you. Like you, he impressed me with the sheer amount of raw strength dwelling within him, and I saw him commanding armies with a mere word and compelling planets, _systems,_ to bow before him. And yet he has proved himself no longer useful to me.” He paused, letting the subtle threat dangle between them, then asked in a voice that reminded Rey of the scrape of metal against metal, “What do we do with things that have outlived their use, Kylo Ren?”

The response that fell off Ben’s tongue was mechanical and toneless, as if it had been scored into him over and over again. “We destroy them, Supreme Leader.”

“Good.” Snoke nodded. “Now, child, show me the power of your new lightsaber.”

In the real world, a million miles and more than a decade away, Rey’s fists clenched in her blankets until her knuckles throbbed. Desperate to wake up, she tossed her head from side to side, knotting her loose hair into a wild mane. It all seemed too cruel to be true: why would the Force bind the two of them together with threads of gossamer and star-stuff and aurora-spun silk, just to make them grit their teeth against the other’s pain from across the galaxy or to have them witness each other’s worst nightmares?

Rey waited, but the killing blow that she’d dreaded never came, as effortless as it would have been for Snoke to bellow out an order for Ben to be locked away like the kneeling youth; as simple as it would have been for Ben to obey and strike—one twitch of the thumb, a quick, wide slash, and then nothing. She felt his chest heaving as he struggled for breath as though he were drowning on dry land, the prickly-hot beading of sweat on his forehead, and the harsh swallow that he gulped down, but she didn’t feel him press the button that would ignite his lightsaber.

“You hesitate now,” Snoke began, spine crooked forwards in anticipation, “but soon, you will kill with the same ease that you breathe. Then, and only then, will you be truly deserving of the name ‘Jedi Killer’.”

_And that’s where you’re wrong: he won’t kill with ease, not ever, not even when you think he’s wholly yours,_ Rey thought, wishing that she could speak it aloud and see Snoke fume. She’d _felt_ Ben’s guilt; it weighed on him like an anvil on his shoulders, and though it had left him for a brief time while he’d fed the forest’s timid wild birds from his open hand, he’d never be free of it—and nor did he want to be, she suspected. Here, he was paralysed at the idea of ending a life, his eyes focused unblinking on the crown of the youth’s head, and a sharp pinch, near-muffled by dreams, told her that his nails were digging crescent-moon marks into his palms.

Snoke’s scarred lips pulled down into a facsimile of a frown, and in an instant, his praise drained away to be replaced with a calculating stare that felt, ridiculous as it was, as if it could see through Ben and all the way into Rey, too. “But perhaps today is not that day,” he said at length, a sigh in his voice. “Perhaps, Kylo Ren, my expectations of you were set too high. As you well know, there is no place here for an apprentice who lacks the ability to perform what I ask of him with unquestioning obedience, but there is still time for you to learn. Enyo Ren,” he called, and a masked woman by Ben’s side jerked her head up, snapping to attention, “escort this cast-off back to his cell for now. The rest of you may go until I have further need of you.”

Enyo Ren— _she’s the woman who tried to kill Ben not long ago,_ Rey remembered, _and she’s every bit as awful as I imagined—_ almost flamed with pride at being chosen as she seized the youth none-too-gently and strode out of the hall, chin tipped high, hauling him with her like a prize. The other Knights wasted no time in trudging after her, but Ben remained behind for a moment or two, as though daring to hope for a reassuring word, then sagged and slipped away.

Ben’s dream-memories flew by her like a swarm of moths, too fast for her to get her bearings, and the largest moon in the strange purple sky grew to a full, heavy orb from a weak silver sickle. Not once did Snoke ask for Ben, though he summoned the others every day, and instead, needing to prove that he could be enough, he trained until his muscles ached in protest. At night, he huddled under a thin, threadbare blanket atop his cot, because Snoke had said that the cold spearing icicle-fingers into his bones would make him stronger. When he ate, he refused the meats and breads offered to him and requested tasteless foods—calorie-dense ration bars and packs; protein paste; packets of veg-meat—because allowing himself to want something and yet denying himself of it would make him pure inside.

She couldn’t tell what his precise thoughts were as he cycled through his forms, but as Snoke’s silence stretched on and on, his panic shaped itself like a pacing caged animal: what if he’d thrown everything away for _this?_

The next time Snoke called for him, planting the barest whisper of _come to me, boy_ in his mind, Ben was so overwhelmed with relief that he let out a sigh from somewhere deep, dark, and afraid. But again, in the stone chamber with its thorns and vines and statues of old long-dead Sith guarding the door, Snoke waited on his throne, his failed apprentice kneeling at his feet. Again, Snoke demanded that Ben kill the youth. The more Rey looked, the more unnatural his pose seemed: his shoulders quivered as if he were straining against invisible bonds, and though she was dreaming, the urge to vomit rose up hot in her gullet.

Rey had killed before, of course: by some luck, she’d managed to avoid ever having to do so on Jakku, even in her dirtiest scuffles, but war had an uncanny knack of bloodying hands. On Takodana, she’d used Han’s blaster and felt nothing amidst the adrenaline of battle surging through her veins, but on Heorot, she’d had no choice but to cut down a group of stormtroopers who’d been shooting at her, and afterwards, she’d turned her shower’s heat dial up to near-scalding and scrubbed at herself until her skin reddened. It had haunted her, how underneath each helmet could have been Finn’s warm eyes or his grinning mouth.

Remembering them, and how it had felt to be responsible for a death and feel that person’s light in the Force go out, she couldn’t help but think that Ben striking down Snoke’s previous apprentice at last had been too _easy,_ and then he glanced down at the body and— _no._

Ben staggered back, shoving his knuckles against his mouth to stifle the scream trying to pitch itself out. The dead youth’s features flickered and blurred, and in the blink of an eye, a hundred more faces flashed over his. Amongst those she didn’t recognise, she saw Han’s, saber-lit crimson, shocked and heartbroken and yet, impossibly, still _loving_ after all this time; Leia’s, her empty stare accusing, dust in her hair and her lashes, rivers of dried blood caked to her forehead; Luke’s, his bright, clever eyes as dim as a house with nobody home.

And _hers._

Her own face, though it was _his_ nightmare. For one of his thundering heartbeats, she was a child, with betrayal and disbelief written over her expression, and for another, she was her adult self, with frozen tear tracks glittering on her cheeks and snowflakes like falling stars drifting down to rest on her lips.

Still half-asleep, Rey’s eyelids cracked open by the slightest sliver, just far enough to see that there were no shadows roaming the darkness of her quarters, looming as though to swallow her whole; that Snoke wasn’t somehow watching her, peering down at her with irises as blue and cold as winter, then they slid shut again and then—

—then she was running through a sea of dew-damp grass, feet flying so fast that she could trip over and be lost if not for the hands clutching hers, and she knew— _knew,_ with all the certainty a small girl could hold—that they’d never let go. A torrent of sounds buffeting her from all angles melded into one raging cacophony: shouts met with more shouts; flames roaring until the very air around her shivered; an unfamiliar noise that _had_ to be blaster fire; chiming bells; and the ear-splitting snapping and popping of wood splintering apart. She wanted to ask _what’s happening what’s wrong why are they shooting where are we going,_ but she was good like they’d told her to be; she pressed the soaked cloth over her nose and mouth like they’d begged her, her eyes streaming sore with ash and smoke—

From the blinding haze of salt and soot and embers came the high-pitched whir of a speeder bike and a woman’s voice. “Wait, stop!” she yelled to them, and Rey and the two people clinging to her hands halted in their tracks. “Please—I can help you—let me take you to somewhere safe—”

A scream exploded behind them, raw and brim-full with the anguish of somebody whose entire world had just ended. “They’re all being _slaughtered_ back there,” cried her storyteller’s voice, “I can’t just leave them there to die!”

In a matter of seconds, somebody, a man, took Rey in his arms—strong arms that could always make her feel safe, even now—and lifted her up to sit her on the speeder. “Take our little girl to the woods and we’ll meet you there before daybreak,” he told the woman, his tone hoarse with urgency. He stooped to kiss Rey’s forehead, and so did her storyteller, who let her lips linger a moment longer, and then he crushed her close to his chest and said in her ear, “You have to _run,_ my star-child. We’ll come back for you, sweetheart, I promise.”

— _you have to run—_

_—my star-child—_

_—we’ll come back for you, sweetheart—_

_—I promise—_

_—I promise—_

Rey jolted awake with sweat-slick skin and a broken sob tearing its way out of her throat. Her breath eluded her, her heart hammered against her ribs, and as awareness seeped over her like morning light, it ached like a fresh wound, more than a body ought to be able to bear. _They didn’t come back for me not because they didn’t want to, but because they_ couldn’t, she thought with startling clarity, and that alone made another little cry force itself out of her. Blinking furiously, she hugged her knees, squeezing them in a pale imitation of the embrace from her nightmare, for there was nobody alive—not Finn, who knew of her yearning but not of the depth of it; nor Luke and Leia, who weren’t _hers,_ no matter how much she wished—who could wrap her up in their arms and hold her as though she were their treasure. _Nobody came back, and I must have waited in the woods for hours, believing that I’d see them again._

_Finn came back for me, even though he was afraid,_ she reminded herself, trying to ground herself—an old trick of hers from Jakku. Some rattled part of her almost expected to find the forest outside her window ablaze, but the world was quiet: it was early dawn, the moon a silvery-white marble against a bed of fading stars and coral-rose clouds, knifed apart by dark, towering trees. She catalogued the picked flowers she’d kept from withering and the potted plants she’d coaxed into growing, told herself _Luke never forgot me, not once in fifteen years,_ and felt her panting subside and her pulse slow. _And Ben, he could have left me yesterday, when I argued with him and started to cry, but he stayed._

_Ben._ In his quarters, perhaps not all that far from her own, he must have lurched upright in a panic to mirror hers, frightened eyes darting about his room and searching for movement in the shadows. Not quite two days ago, that—constant tests of his loyalty; his survival depending on him being the best; and Snoke, alwaysalways _always_ in his head—had been his reality, from which he could escape neither in waking nor in dreams. Somehow, his nightmare had bled into her, which meant… which meant that he must have seen hers, too.

Amidst the embarrassment that flooded her and burned her cheeks, a spark of hope flared in that tender place in her chest: did he know anything about what she’d seen? She remembered being a child and creeping into his bunk to crawl under his duvets, mumbling with a sleep-thick tongue about bad dreams and fire, so what if she’d once drowsily mentioned something important?

Soon, she’d meet with Luke to train as they always did, but this time, Ben would be joining them. Ben, who’d duelled her in Starkiller Base’s flurries of snow, at the foot of jagged mountains on Heorot, and on the ice of Boreas. Ben, who’d been just a young boy himself when he’d allowed her to curl her tiny body up beside his to take refuge from her dreams; who’d killed his father but saved his mother. Kylo Ren or Ben Organa, who’d hurt Finn, and who’d sat in the forest clearing and fed birds from the palm of his hand, his expression curious and filled with such soft wonder. Her emotions, usually so clear, were a confusing mess, and she couldn’t tell if the prospect made her nervous, or excited, or some odd jumble of both.

Sighing, wrestling with the leaden weight of the soreness inside her, Rey heaved herself out of bed.

All she could ever do was keep going on.

 

* * *

 

Echoes of her dreams still clung to her even as she tried to make herself eat breakfast, as if they were the scent of smoke lingering behind on her clothes, and she couldn’t bear to finish the honey-drizzled flatcake that Finn had pushed onto her plate after noticing how withdrawn she seemed. Her nightmare—and Ben’s—had felt so _real,_ and she only had to lose track of her thoughts for a moment before she smelled the burning wood and heard the shouting and screaming once more. It drowned out the cafeteria’s silverware-against-silverware clattering and its hum of a hundred different conversations, turning her stomach and leaving her restless like an exposed wire, anxious to get up and do _something_ to distract herself.

_I should tell Finn the truth soon,_ Rey told herself, listlessly dipping pieces of flatcake into a pool of golden honey. _If there’s anybody who’ll understand what it’s like to want to know your family so much it hurts, it’s him._

She knew that Ben was nearby before the cafeteria’s doors slid open; as he approached, the ethereal silver and gold threads that bound them began fluttering like the wings of a bird about to take flight, drawing her gaze towards where he stood at the threshold. Even from afar, he looked as tired as she felt: great shadows in the precise purple of a day-old bruise were smudged underneath his eyes, and he carried himself as though a set of invisible strings meant to hold him up had been severed. All chatter lulled to a rush of whispers as he stepped inside. For one long bated breath, Rey worried that somebody would leap out of their chair to hit him—and not, she realised, because she herself would feel the pain of the blow.

Because Ben, knowing him, would allow it. If he wanted to, he could crush their windpipe with the merest clench of a fist, or freeze them before they could reach him at all, but he’d stand there unmoving and take the punch wherever they pleased.

When he returned with his tray—he was a large man, both tall and strong, and so doubtless needed to eat more than the small cup of caf and the single slice of toast he’d picked up—she watched him seek out a table in a secluded corner of the room, as if hoping in vain that by choosing a seat furthest away from everyone else, he’d make himself invisible. He sat, folding himself up to fit on the chair, keeping his head down and his eyes trained on his scanty meal. Strands of his inky hair slipped out of place, exposing a pair of ears blazing pink at the tips, and Rey half-listened to Jessika Pava’s eager account of what two pilots were caught doing in an X-Wing, instead eyeing Ben and his too-tense shoulders and ridiculous ears.

A shiver-quick frisson of surprise shot through her when he glanced up and met—and _held—_ her stare. _I’m sorry for what you saw,_ came his voice in her mind, sounding so close that he could have been beside her. _You shouldn’t have had to see that._ A furrow pulled between his black eyebrows, and he added, halting as though to find the words, _I was fifteen, then, and that boy was the first person I… I ever killed. It’s only right that I haven’t been able to forget, but you oughtn’t be subjected to it._

Without another word, and without giving her a chance to say _but you couldn’t help it_ or _I’m sorry, too, for what I made_ you _see_ or _how in R’iia’s name do we stop it from happening again,_ he rose, abrupt, and left, his food going uneaten.

Rey frowned at his empty seat and drew her jacket—Leia’s gift to her from months ago, still one of her most precious possessions—tighter around herself, a chill leaching through her bloodstream and prickling gooseflesh on her forearms at the memory of what they’d unwillingly shared with each other. Snoke, and how he’d towered over her on his throne, manipulating Ben like a plaything. How his cold stone hall and its thorns and crumbling statues had melted away into fire and dry-throated, desperate running and hands grasping hers, and how the people with her had vanished, too. What good were kisses and promises if they were all she had, not names or faces or explanations as to _why_ she couldn’t remember anything?

Before she went to meet Luke in the clearing, each of her friends wished her luck, Jess with a light-hearted punch to the shoulder and a grinning _you can do it!_ that, for maybe a fraction of a second, made her feel like she truly _could._ Her brief bravery ebbed away and drained through the floor once she stepped out of the cafeteria and saw Ben waiting for her, leaning against an alcove. At the sight of him, her heart started to beat in double-time, becoming a curious, nervous thing pitter-pattering in her chest.

“You didn’t have to wait for me,” she told him, daring to offer him a barely-there twitch of a smile.

Ben gave the tiniest shrug. “I wanted to,” he replied simply.

They walked in silence—not an uncomfortable silence that left them hyper-aware of the other’s every movement like she’d feared, but something almost companionable, with Ben shortening his strides to match her pace—until they reached the doors that led to the surrounding fields and forest. Outside, the sky was a heavy blanket of dove-grey streaked with fiery rose, the soaring sun and the setting moon both resting in the clouds, and Rey’s head swam with stray wisps of dreams: the distant, silvery twinkling of bells; a whispering ocean to lull her to sleep; a storyteller; and day-wolves and night-wolves, chasing comets and wearing star-glow and sunbeams braided into their coats.

“You used to have those dreams at the Praxeum,” Ben said out of nowhere, his voice soft. “Not just the nightmares, but about the wolves, too, and a dozen more fairy tales besides.”

Rey’s footsteps faltered, but she forced herself to keep walking. She restrained herself from rounding on him and imploring him to _tell me everything please I want to know,_ and settled for asking, “What was I like when I first came to Nysa?”

“Luke used to tell us that when you arrived, you clamped your mouth shut and wouldn’t talk to him at all, no matter how much he tried to coax you into saying something.” Though she couldn’t see his face, a rare suggestion of a smile hid in his tone, so slight that she might have missed it had she not been listening hard. “It wasn’t until he gave in and called me over that you spoke a single word.” Ben paused, his feet swishing through the dew-jewelled grass, then tentatively asked, “Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes,” Rey breathed almost at once, her lungs tight with wanting. _More than you could ever imagine,_ she added to herself, meaning for it to be private, but sensing the sharp hitch of his sorrowful inhale all the same.

Alinor’s expanses of lush green shimmered away around her as Ben offered a memory to her as gently as he could, giving her the option to shove it away if she changed her mind. Letting in the images and the feel of him—shifting streams of silver; frost and moonlight; warm leather and fresh pine—Rey halted and closed her eyes.

_(A lanky-limbed, big-eared Ben Organa crouched down to be level with a tiny version of herself, a three-year-old Rey so frightened that little shivers had taken over her skinny frame and a teary red rimmed her wide eyes. “Hey,” Ben said, his voice as uneven as a boy’s, “I’m Ben. What’s your name, kid?”_

_Before she replied with a tremulous “Rey”, she paused, her eyebrows knitting and her mouth opening without a sound, as though she’d had the answer—a different answer—perching on the tip of her tongue, but it had winked away too quickly for her to say it out loud._

_Ben frowned, looking perplexed for a split-second, as if thinking to himself that_ Rey _was an odd thing to name a child, then recovered. “Rey?” he repeated, examining the easy, bright feel of it, and smiled—the kind of smile that told her that he was a person to be trusted; that this was somebody she’d come to like very much. “Like a ray of sunshine?”_

_At that, a grin like daybreak unfurled on her child self’s mouth, and Ben couldn’t resist mirroring it.)_

“That was where your nickname—Sunshine—came from,” she heard Ben explain once she’d slipped back into her own body and onto solid ground, the dreamsilk curtain of memories lifting away from before her eyes and revealing rows of trees with rustling green-gold leaves. “I don’t know what made me decide to say it, but since it seemed to make you so happy, it stuck. And you—you stuck to me after that.”

“I already asked Luke a while ago,” Rey hedged, “but you knew me best, so did I remember anything; anything at all? Or maybe mention something about before?”

For a moment, Ben said nothing, as though trying to formulate a response both truthful and tactful, then he answered carefully, “You remembered your own name, and that you were born in the middle of summer.” As soon as the words had left his lips, she had a sudden, silver-limned vision of him laying a hand on hers to try, in his nervous, touch-shy way, to comfort her against the disappointment. Seeing what he ached to do, she could almost— _almost—_ believe that he cared for her. He clenched his fist at his side, suppressing the urge that had seized him, and continued, “In the beginning, when we asked, you couldn’t tell us where you were from, or what happened to you—all you’d say to me was that you wanted your parents. Later, you stopped talking about them altogether, as if you’d forgotten, but you did mention a name. A woman’s.”

She’d started to move again, but now, Rey fell to a dead stop. Ben stilled and whipped around to face her, his eyes scanning hers—as if he were worried for her, she thought, and at the idea of it, however unlikely, a peculiar short-lived glow flickered inside her. “A woman’s name?” she managed over the blood roaring in her ears. “Which woman’s name?”

“Alethea,” he said, and though her heart stumbled and lost its rhythm, nothing came rushing back to her. “You told me that she’d helped you, but clammed up, shook your head, and changed the subject when I asked how.”

“I… I can’t remember any of this.” Her voice breaking apart into a frantic, quavering mess, she screwed her eyes shut until she saw fizzing stars, hunting for a string of memory to tug and reveal something, _anything,_ of her missing past: a blink-quick flash of a face, the sound of a voice, a familiar scent, or even a taste. But there was nothing, just an impenetrable blankness until the burst of colour that was Nysa, like a tree with no roots sprawling beneath. Seventeen years ago, somebody had perhaps saved her life amidst smoke and walls of fire, and she’d forgotten them. She’d forgotten _everything._ On the verge of jamming her fingers into her temples and willing the memories to return, she met his gaze. “Why—why can’t I remember any of this?”

Ben’s mouth worked, but he didn’t avert his eyes from hers. “Young Force-sensitive children are often unable to control how and when their powers manifest,” he told her with gentleness that ought to have been impossible coming from a man who’d murdered his father. “We thought you might have… experienced a traumatic event and made yourself forget, somehow.”

“But what if I’ve forgotten my own _name?”_ Her voice took on a high, strangled pitch; nearby, a night-bird roosting in the boughs startled awake and gave its wings an anxious flutter. “Just before I fell asleep on the _Starbird,_ I heard somebody say a name and it—it felt like mine. It felt _right._ But I’ve always— _always—_ been Rey, and I’ve never had a reason to think otherwise, even on Jakku, when that was _all_ I had of myself.”

“What was it? The name?”

Rey looked away, chewing the inside of her cheek and debating for a series of dragged-in breaths if she ought to tell him, or if she ought to keep it held close, like a secret meant just for her. Like something that, if it _did_ belong to her, could never be stolen from her again. At last, the word tumbled from her tongue, and as it did, a soft warmth suffused into her skin, bringing with it the feeling of being bathed in golden dawn light rich enough to drink. “Aurelia,” she said, savouring the sound of it and how the weight of not speaking of it floated from her shoulders. “They called me Aurelia.”

“Aurelia.” Even shaped by Ben’s lips, it felt right, as though she’d been supposed to share it with him. “It… suits you,” he got out after considering it for another moment, his voice full of wonder. “All over the galaxy, it means ‘golden’, but on Naboo, it has a second meaning: ‘dawn’.”

“How do you know these things?”

“The Naboo are… I was raised there, and names are—like Alderaanian folktales—an important part of their culture,” he began. “You might choose to name your child as a sort of good luck charm with a quality or blessing that you want to bestow upon them, or after a person, to honour them or in the hope that your child will grow to emulate them. My grandmother named my mother and my uncle as a final message to Va—my grandfather.” At Rey’s inquiring glance, he said with half a smile, “Her ghost told me as much. She knew that she was dying, and though her body was giving up on her, her mind had no intention of following suit, not until the very end.”

_Of course,_ Rey thought, catching the faintest, dreamiest hint of petal-soft perfume and gentle spring rains on the morning breeze. Official medical records, Luke had said, held that the stress of childbirth combined with the utter devastation of the Republic collapsing around her had been too much for Padmé’s body to cope with, and that she—like many thousands of frightened women in the dunes who, according to the myths about Jakku’s dead, carried their babies with them into the constellations or watched from above as they grew—had slid wearily into death. But with a shake of his head, he’d revealed the truth that he and all of Naboo knew: his mother had died with unwavering faith in her heart, and with enough fight in her veins to rattle the stars.

“So, what does Ben mean?” she asked.

“My mother named me after Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he replied. Another of Luke’s ghosts, Rey recalled from nights spent listening over the wind and waves on Ahch-To: a man who felt like rolling sands, bone-deep sorrow, and the glare from twin suns glinting off fox-gold hair. “I’m told that he was a good, brave man.”

Leia Organa could have named her newborn son for anything—wealth, power, wisdom, victory, knowledge, or even beauty—and yet, with countless bright possibilities beckoning to the boy in her arms, she’d wished only goodness and bravery on him. Rey’s sore chest tightened further at the thought: she could wonder for the rest of her life what _her_ mother had longed for when giving her a name, or what kind of person _her_ parents had hoped she’d become, but she’d never get to find out. “If I’m not Rey,” she said, a plaintive edge creeping into her voice, “and I’m Aurelia instead, then—then I don’t really know who I am, do I?”

“You do,” Ben assured her. “If that is your birth name, it doesn’t have to change who you are. You are who you choose to be.”

Looking up at him—Ben, who’d thought of his fall as an inevitability; who’d believed himself to have been born a monster—and skipping a breath at the pure sincerity in his dark eyes, she remembered the stories that he’d spun for her when they’d been young. Almost all of them were heirlooms from Leia, salvaged from Alderaan: tales of captured princes trapped in stone towers, warrior queens, ferocious dragons and the princesses who tamed them, and tricksters outwitted by clever maidens. In some, curses could be broken and the bewitched could be set free by speaking their true name, and Ben had explained how that was who a person was, at their core. _Like how Darth Vader was always truly Anakin Skywalker,_ she thought, _and FN-2187 is always going to be Finn, and maybe I can be whoever I choose, too._

“I’m going to do everything I can to remember,” she insisted, setting her jaw and willing conviction into her voice. “There _has_ to be something,” she added, because the alternative—her parents, her homeworld, and her first three years of life lost forever—was too awful for her to stand, and if the bond alerted Ben to her uncertainty, he made no mention of it. “We should keep moving, or else Luke will be worrying that we’ve killed each other.”

As they walked on, their feet crushing through the grass and their boots shining wet with dew, Rey let out an exhale and with it, some of the rawness that had been aching within her since she’d awoken. She knew Ben and Kylo and almost all that made him up, and now, he knew the worst parts of her—the dreams of flames, storytellers, wolves, silver blossoms, and bells that might as well have belonged to another girl; the way Jakku had trained her to keep her heart stubborn and slow to thaw; and the loneliness that threatened to consume her even in a crowded room. He’d seen _her_ as she’d yearned for somebody to see her, and he hadn’t shied away.

“If we’re stuck with this bond,” she began, keeping her gaze fixed on the forest looming ahead, “the least we can do is find a way to stop our nightmares from affecting each other. Something tells me that your head isn’t the quietest of places, and right now, nor is mine.”

“I don’t see us as stuck with it,” Ben replied, his tone soft and almost hurt, and an instant twang of regret snapped in her belly. “The Force wouldn’t connect us like this—” he gestured between them with one hand, as though mimicking the shimmering cords tied about their littlest fingers and looped around their very beings, “—for no reason. But about the nightmares: I’ve often considered the benefits of a swift blow to the head, myself,” he said wryly, sounding so put-out that Rey couldn’t help but curl her lips up into a smile.

Luke was waiting for them in the clearing, sitting lotus-like beneath the black branches of a gorsa tree, his eyes shut in meditation and a scattering of fallen orange petals glowing like tiny fading stars in his lap. He looked like how a Jedi Master _should_ look, she thought, serene and wholly attuned to the living, breathing planet around them, but once they drew near, he peered up at them and smiled. An inkling of something nostalgic and bittersweet glimmered in his eyes before he snuffed it out, erasing it as if it had never existed at all, and she didn’t need to be able to read minds to know that he was thinking of what could have been.

For perhaps the barest sliver of a second, she knew, he’d imagined them as his Jedi Knights, standing proud and tall and luminous in the wildflower-freckled meadows of Nysa, with the Praxeum gleaming in the sunlight and the laughter and joy-filled shouts of a dozen more padawans ringing in the distance.

He stood and passed a low-powered training lightsaber to each of them. “I know I’m throwing you both into the deep end, but if neither of you have any objections, you’re going to spar,” he told them. “You share a Force bond, which is—well, I’ve read about them in a different form, between a master and an apprentice, but never like this. If you can feel one another’s thoughts, emotions, and sensations, I want to see how it’ll affect the way you fight.” With a shrug that—she hoped—hid the flare of nervous excitement that rocketed through her, Rey ignited her weapon. Ben followed suit, the weak blade buzzing in his hands. “It won’t be long until you’re ready to craft your own lightsaber, Rey,” Luke continued, “so it might help if you spent some time thinking of a design for it.”

At once, accustomed to her scavenged quarterstaff, Rey’s thoughts jumped to a saberstaff, like the ones she’d seen in Luke’s holos of old Jedi—but the Jedi were dead, and with a handful of exceptions, the Empire had made sure to destroy what they’d left behind. “Where would I get my crystal from?” she asked. _And what colour would the Force choose for me?_

“Years ago, before the Empire rose, it might have been Ilum,” Luke started, his words weighed down with a sigh, “but nowadays, those caves are rubble, carved up and abandoned when there was nothing more to use.” His gaze flickered faraway with grief that belonged half to him and half to the ghosts who kept him company at night, and it dawned on her then that maybe even _he_ couldn’t sleep soundly. “There’s just a few places left that the First Order haven’t bled dry, dotted here and there about the galaxy. I’d had some in mind for my first group of padawans, for when their turns rolled around.”

Guilt as thick as thunderclouds stormed from Ben, whose knuckles had gone death-white around his weapon’s hilt. A hail of second-hand images and fragments of noises torrented through the bond, and Rey bit the inside of her lower lip, struggling to stay afloat amidst a sea of betrayed faces and confused cries of _Ben what are you doing Ben no—_

“Like I told you yesterday: when you feel ready, you can work on healing your crystal,” Luke said to Ben, who—almost gratefully, as though emerging from yet another nightmare—snapped out of his memory-fog upon being addressed. “Don’t worry, I’ll show you how.”

Ben shifted from foot to foot. “I’m not ready yet,” he admitted.

“You’ve been here for a day; I’d have been very surprised if you were,” Luke replied, offering him a kind smile that widened into a grin. “Now, you two, I’ve babbled on about lightsabers enough, haven’t I? Go ahead and spar.”

Needing no further encouragement, Rey moved backwards to one end of the clearing and slipped into a fighting stance, fluid as rain, her feet a shoulder-width apart and her lightsaber singing in her hands. Opposite her, Ben shucked off his cape and mirrored her, and though his jacket covered his biceps and the muscles of his forearms, the powerful lines of his body bracing as he poised for attack reminded her of just how _strong_ he was—of how simple it would have been for him to kill her on Starkiller Base if he’d wanted her dead. The moment their eyes met, the thread of tension stretched thin between them frayed and broke in half. Blades clashed with a hum as they flew at each other, and as she lost herself to the thrill of the fight, to the head-spinning blur of trees and wildflowers and searing-bright saberglow whizzing before her, she could have laughed aloud.

It was as if she and Ben were one soul split into two bodies, knowing the other as well as they did themselves. She sensed his slash at her middle before it came and dodged to avoid it, registering it as a warning quiver in the Force that told her to _move,_ and he anticipated her sideways swipe at his neck and blocked it, snaring her in a saberlock, pushing her back inch by inch until she wrestled herself away. It felt like being _free—_ like the more she leapt, thrust, parried, and barred his strikes, the lighter her heavy insides became—until, distracted by that thought, she failed to jump back when she should have. The edge of his blade caught her on the wrist, bringing an angry pink singe-mark to bloom.

_“Sithspit!”_ she swore instinctively, rubbing at her reddened skin with her thumb.

The wound was so minor that it didn’t bear much thinking about—it was no more painful than rope burns from when she’d been younger and she’d fumbled while navigating the innards of a Star Destroyer, or a cut from a sharp piece of scrap—but Ben’s face drained of all colour nonetheless. Wide-eyed, he deactivated his training lightsaber, his thoughts spiralling towards her as a dizzying whirl of _dark-cruel-masked-creature-monster-monster_ and his pulse rattling hard enough to shake her own. _Stop it!_ she almost screamed at him, clamping her lips together to keep the words caged between them.

Luke hurried over to inspect the damage, wrapping his flesh-and-blood fingers around her stinging wrist. “It’s not too bad,” he said gently, then aimed a pointed glance down at his cybernetic hand and joked, “and besides, I daresay that I’ve had worse.” Once she’d let out an amused huff, he turned to Ben, who remained frozen to the spot, and levelled him with a shrewd gaze. “How well can you heal?” he asked him.

“I don’t know,” Ben answered, his voice hoarse. “I… I’ve not used the Light to do it in years.”

Shards of flashbacks speared by her in the space between one blink and the next. A storm-drenched battlefield caked in mud, then pale-fingered hands, smeared up to the elbows with blood. A woman with dirt scuffed over her cheeks and a mess of wounds soaking through her tunic, her breathing getting shallower as she died with nothing that a group of kneeling black-clad figures could do to save her, not without the Light, and Kylo Ren hadn’t allowed himself to reach for it since he’d been a boy calling himself Ben.

Releasing her and gesturing to his own face, Luke asked, “Did you use the Dark on your scar?”

“No,” Ben replied, shaking his head, “I left that one alone. But I did try with the others.” He rolled up the sleeve of his jacket as high as it would go and twisted his arm this way and that, first revealing webs of silvery scars criss-crossing his forearm, then a set of deep, jagged pearl-pink gashes scored into his bicep. Rey suppressed a gasp: they had to be years old, but none of them looked like they’d mended properly, and somehow, the latter marks still seemed angry. “I shouldn’t have. The Light was forbidden to me then, and I was wrong to assume that the Dark would be enough—or that I was enough for the Dark.”

“What’s the difference between the two?” Rey asked.

“The Light gives,” Luke told her, “but the Dark takes. I don’t mean to try and frighten you away from it, but the Dark Side demands that you commit an act worthy of it in order for the healing to work—and even then, there’s a physical cost alongside the psychological. It always leaves a scar, and in some severe cases, the healing doesn’t stick for long, and needs to be repeated over and over. With the Light, you call upon the Force, channel it, and _ask_ it to flow through you to heal you or another person.” His voice softening, he went on, “Even if you don’t feel like you can reach it, or if you’re worried that it might not listen, always— _always—_ try to use the Light. It’ll be there, no matter who you are or what you’ve done.” He looked over at Ben and cocked his head as if weighing him up, then prompted, “Heal Rey’s wound for me.”

“There’s no need for that,” Rey protested weakly. “A bit of bacta will fix it up in no time.”

“You’re right, it would,” Luke agreed, his eyes twinkling, “but that’d defeat my point.” Ben hadn’t moved, so he smiled and encouraged him with a cheerful, “Go on, Ben, she’s not exactly going to bare her teeth and bite your hand off.”

Tentative, as though afraid that she’d do just that, Ben approached her, and like a pair bewitched, they sank to their knees in the grass carpeted with gorsa petals and scattered pine needles. She held out her arm for him, and after a second’s hesitation, he took her wrist in one large hand and hovered the other a hairsbreadth above it, a whisper away from grazing the thin skin and the roadmap of green-blue veins branching out beneath. This close to him, she could feel his sharp little intake of breath as he touched her, and a nervous thrill skittered up her spine at the knowledge that in turn, he could feel her pulse quickening. If she let her eyes flutter shut, she’d be able to see the star-spun gold and silver threads of _them_ seeking, intertwining, curling around each other, but she wanted to keep them open for this.

Ben closed his eyes in concentration, and Rey followed the swoop of his sooty lashes down to his fingers, which—like the magic from a fairy-story made real—shone with orbs of blue light so bright they were almost white. From them, a warm glow poured into her, spreading from the site of her wound to the aching place behind her ribs and all the way to the tips of her toes. She murmured a tiny _oh!_ in surprise and, too enchanted to dare blink, watched as the burn’s hot red flush bled away, its edges swallowed themselves up, and it faded to smooth, unblemished skin at last.

Gazing at her wrist with an unspoken _wow_ bubbling between her parted lips, she scarcely noticed him letting her go and backing away. What he’d done was minor, she knew—Luke had told her that there’d once been Jedi who could guide a broken bone back together, or stem the flow of blood from a catastrophic injury until help arrived, or even revive others from the brink of death—but seeing and _feeling_ it happen before her very eyes had left her breathless with awe.

“Nicely done, Ben!” Something about the brilliance of Luke’s ear-to-ear beam made him look so young—so whole—that they could have been on Nysa after all, with everything he’d dreamed of building anew still within his grasp. “And look how easily you were able to call on the Light.”

But Ben hadn’t heard him. He stared down at his palms, disbelieving eyes flitting between each, his thoughts a confusing muddle eddying in the air around him: _how can these hands that have held lightsabers to cleave people in two mend flesh they belong to a monster not a healer don’t they why does the Light still accept me after all I’ve done—_

“I think that ought to cover it for today,” Luke said, his triumphant grin never faltering. _You didn’t plan on me getting hurt, but you_ knew _he wouldn’t fail when you told him to fix it, didn’t you?_ Rey thought at him, hiding her smile. _You wanted to remind him of who he is._ In response, he shot her a private wink—an actual _wink—_ and continued, “You’re both—well, when you fight, even against each other, you’re perfectly in sync, and it’s _incredible_ to watch. If you’re open to the idea of training together when you’re not with me, I’ve gone ahead and pulled a few strings to grab hold of a room for you to use.”

With just a quiet _thank you_ and nothing else, not even a _goodbye,_ Ben shrugged on his cape and turned to make his way back towards the base. On any other day, and if she’d had any other nightmare, Rey might have stayed behind with Luke, wanting to bask in the peace of the forest for a while longer before wading into the cacophony of _life_ inside, but now, she itched to talk to Ben. She thanked Luke and slung a _see you tomorrow_ over her shoulder before following after Ben, glad beyond words for him halting to allow her to catch up.

Until she spoke, the silence hanging between them wasn’t companionable as it had been earlier, but anticipatory like a stalled breath, where the questions cooped up behind their lips had their own fluttering pulse as they struggled to break free.

“Have you been having nightmares for long?” she asked when she could tolerate it no more.

“For as long as I can remember,” Ben replied, clearly trying to feign nonchalance. “Even while I was at the Praxeum. Though—” he paused, hesitated, and tightened his jaw as if to steel himself, “—they always seemed to stop when you were nearby.”

“When I was nearby,” Rey echoed, trailing off to mull it over while they walked. “Wait,” she burst out as the tree canopies gave way to a sky as grey as a rock dove’s belly. “What if we could stop them using the bond? If we can link with each other during our dreams without meaning to, what’s to say we can’t do it on purpose and change what happens?”

“We’ll try it,” Ben said firmly. “Tonight,” he added, and it felt like a promise.

Her footsteps were light and buoyed with fresh hope as she imagined going to sleep and waking up without the there-but-not-there taste of ash on her tongue, and that blissful thought almost eclipsed the charged shift in the air. The electric crackle of a coming thunderstorm ran from the nape of her neck to her soles, then it began to rain: a slow, fine drizzle at first, intensifying in moments to a downpour that bounced off the grass, rustled in the leaves, and smacked her straight on the crown of her head. Rey stood still in the midst of it and beamed, wanting all of a sudden to outstretch her arms and let sheets of water stream from them like a pair of veiled wings.

Pulling up the hood of his cape, Ben shrank back under a tree. “You act as though you’ve never seen rain before.”

“Of course I’ve seen rain before—you did your very best to drown me in our meadow-dream, remember? _And_ you picked a contender for one of the galaxy’s wettest planets for us to rescue you from.” Rey shut her eyes, tilting her head up for fat droplets of rain to drip down her cheeks. “It rains here sometimes, but never like this. _This,”_ she pronounced with delight, her hair sticking to her forehead, “is a proper storm—nearly as good as Elan’s.”

She could hear Ben’s almost-smile as he warned her, “You’re going to catch a chill.” In her memories, now safely settled in to the spots they’d always been meant to occupy, the Ben of their childhoods hefted up a laughing, shivering Rey to wrangle her from tearing barefoot through grass glittering with frost just because she could, speaking with the same voice: _I don’t know where you’re from, Sunshine, but here, we have these things called winters, and you’re gonna catch a chill if you keep on doing that—_

“That’s an old spacers’ tale,” she retorted without glancing back at him.

Damn him for it, but he’d been right. As they started to walk again, the cold from her soaking wet clothes crept beneath her skin and dug into her bones, and she hugged her elbows, trying in vain not to let a shiver take hold of her. No doubt feeling its phantom trickling down his back, Ben turned to her and frowned. “You’re freezing,” he said, and before she could protest, he’d draped his cape over her shoulders and quirked up his lips. “You can return it in the morning, providing you don’t freeze us both,” he told her, and though his tone was dry, his eyes were kind.

The cape was made of thick, heavy wool that wrapped her in exquisite warmth— _his_ warmth, from a body so hot, she supposed he must give out enough heat to rival a furnace. She tugged it closer around herself, and without realising what she was doing at first, ducked her chin and breathed it in, inhaling the scent she was coming to know as _Ben:_ winters she’d yet to experience; warm spice; new nerf-leather; and pine, as if, like her, he belonged in the woods.

As the base came into view, a spike of his anxiety juddered the bond, and the nagging question burning on her tongue finally reached boiling point. “You can never go back now, you know,” she said, as gentle as she could muster, “not now that Snoke knows you saved me at the Praxeum. Do you—have you ever regretted that? That you didn’t take the Force from me like everybody else?” Her mouth stopped wanting to work, but she managed to ask in a rush, “That you didn’t kill me when you had the chance?”

Ben flinched as though she’d struck him, clenched his fists, and stepped in front of her, so close that if she’d had the urge, she could have traced the shower of moles on his cheeks and counted each one. “Look at me, Rey,” he said, cupping her face in his big, gentle hands. “Look at me,” he repeated, and she made herself meet his gaze. The storm had tipped his eyelashes with tiny beads of water, and without his hooded cape, raindrops rolled from his untidy curls. “I regret many things. I have done so much that I’d undo in a heartbeat if I could, but not any of that. Never sparing you, no matter what Snoke says or does. I need you to tell me that you know that.” He swallowed hard, and in a desperate whisper, begged her, _“Please.”_

“I know,” Rey said softly, her heart a wild, racing thing pounding against her breastbone.

Her fingers were callused and rough from years spent sifting through wrecks, but his were smooth, feather-light at the delicate skin underneath her eyes, and though she had only the vaguest of dreams for comparison, he held her like someone who treasured her. His lips parted as if he were about to speak, then he blinked and shook his head as though to wake himself from a trance. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—” he blurted out, let go of her, and strode away so quickly that she was left alone in the fields, wondering if any of it—the silver feel of him, the unreadable look in his eyes, the way their bond _sang_ as they touched—had been real at all.

 

* * *

 

Hours later, after taking his next meals in his quarters, Ben fell asleep to unbidden thoughts of Rey.

He thought of how powerful she’d been as they’d sparred, with her eyes ablaze and a determined half-smile playing on her mouth, and how anybody’s final mistake would be to think her weak.

He thought of the feel of her narrow wrist and the rabbit-jump of her pulse underneath the pads of his fingers as he’d healed her, and the way the fierce, bright gold of her in the Force had streamed like sunlight into him and warmed him from the inside out.

And—this last thought he kept locked away like a secret, wishing that he could ignore the unfamiliar feeling coursing through his veins, as if some dormant part of him had woken up. How she’d looked in the downpour as he’d come close enough to smell her: grass and rain on her wet skin; vanilla soap from her hair; and summers he’d almost forgotten after over a decade of knowing nothing but snow, space, and cold stars. How her eyes had been wide and searching—but not afraid—and how that strange new part of him had wanted to map out the freckles strewn like fields of stars across her nose and cheeks.

He might have dozed off with his head full of Rey, but he’d been a fool for daring to hope that he’d be given a night where the fog of dreams swirling in his mind didn’t darken and shift into nightmares.

This time, in the nightmare, he wasn’t himself. Instead, he stooped to fit into a body several inches shorter than his own, and as he tried to get used to it, he was jarred by the speed of its heartbeat, the weight at its slender waist—somehow, without having to glance down, he knew that he wore an empty water canteen and a mishmash of salvaged leather packs on his belt—and the simmering of thirst in its throat, scraping at each stubborn breath he pushed through the too-small lungs.

_Rey._ He was Rey, as she’d been him, and now, he was going to be forced to see what haunted _her._

Ben—no, Rey—waded through an endless ocean of shin-deep sand as thick as treacle, her feet leaden and all of her aching joints creaking, whispering for her to _give up lie down stop and rest stay here forever you’ve always known that you’ll die out here._ Still she pressed on, until her sore, blister-stung foot snagged on _something_ buried in the dunes, and with a yelp, she tripped, throwing out her hands to break her fall. She strained, cursing and hissing the name _R’iia,_ but she couldn’t pull them free, as though they’d been glued stuck. The sands began to pour, and in seconds, they’d swallowed her up, flooding into her nose, into her mouth, and Ben couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t _scream,_ and he—

—remembered her asking _what if we could stop our nightmares using the bond,_ told himself that he _could_ breathe and that none of it was real, and focused. He dug through his memories until he found a chink of happiness in the past, brilliant enough to sear through the sand entombing the two of them, and with all the strength left in him, willed it into being.

When the shroud of darkness obscuring his vision cleared away, Rey was beside him, her hazel eyes saucer-round and glittery with wonder as she drank in the scenery that he’d preserved picture-perfect from memory. He watched her take it in: the fountain babbling next to them, ringed with sweet-smelling blue-red millaflowers; the domed buildings made of colourful turquoise stone and white marble that glowed in the moonlight; the waterfalls rushing down from the cliffs; the statues lining the streets, some of them adorned with such fine details, it was less far-fetched to believe that they’d been crafted with magic rather than by a human hand; the paper lanterns floating in the sky; and the canopy of twinkling stars stretching above them. Somewhere in this very city, there would be a house with a rope ladder of ivy climbing all the way up to a young boy’s bedroom window, and when this memory had been the present, that boy had stood where they now stood, wearing a smile as bright as Rey’s.

“Where _are_ we?” she asked, breathless not from fright, but from the awe that positively shone in her eyes. She brushed the tip of a finger over the edge of a millaflower’s petal, and the whole plant seemed to lean towards her, as if seeking the sun. “Wow,” she whispered to it, cupping the bloom’s delicate head in her palms.

_Even the flowers want to be near her,_ Ben caught idly drifting across his mind, and then shook his head with more zeal than necessary, banishing the thought. “Naboo,” he managed around a gulp. “The capital, Theed.”

Before either of them could speak again, a _boom_ rocked Ben’s eardrums, and for a moment, his heart swelled with so much bittersweet nostalgia, he feared that he might shame himself by tearing up. Dozens of fireworks exploded above them, creating dazzling formations in mid-air: first an Alliance Starbird with wings so wide that they could have enveloped the city, each vivid feather fizzing and fading to curls of smoke; then a fleet of ships—X-wings, Y-wings, and N-1 starfighters—that sailed through the sky; an almost exact replica of the planet, composed of multiple shades of blue and green and white; and nova lilies, millaflowers, and candlewicks, the latter outlined with pale oranges and golds.

Rey jolted at the loud noise, and though she was unarmed, her hand instinctively shot towards her hip. As she kept watching, her guard dropped, and she drew in a tiny gasp of amazement. “Real fireworks,” she breathed without ever taking her eyes off the sky. This time, the shape of a silvery loth-wolf lit up amongst the stars, its great shaggy head tilted back to howl at Ohma-D’un, Naboo’s largest moon. A string of musical notes streamed from the loth-wolf’s open mouth, spiralling past its snout and vanishing to smoky puffs. “I’ve never seen any before—none that weren’t in a holovid, anyway. They’re so _beautiful,_ Ben, and you got to _live_ here.” There was a peculiar mix of joy and envy in her words, and he found himself wondering if _she_ had a place like this: a happy moment that she could drag him into to chase away the shadows looming over them as they slept. “Are they celebrating something?”

“This is one of my memories of the Festival of Light, an annual event commemorating the anniversary of Naboo joining the Republic,” he explained. He angled himself to steal a glimpse at her, bathed in a myriad of vibrant colours, her eyes swimming with stars, and felt his lips curve up of their own accord. “It’s no substitute for actually seeing it in person,” he told her, “but this is almost as beautiful as the real thing.”

“And those—what are they for?” she asked, pointing up at the sea of gliding lanterns.

“Those are… an old tradition,” he said, his mouth going dry. A pang so sudden and sharp that he lost his breath gnawed at his chest, making his heart feel as fragile as an eggshell, and he curled his hands into tight fists to steady himself. “People write their heart’s deepest desire onto a piece of paper, fold it up, tuck it safely into their lantern, and send it up. The sun, the moons, and the stars are meant to see them and decide if yours comes true.”

No matter what he’d wished for—he’d been five when he’d asked to become a pilot like his father when he grew up, but ten when he’d hidden his slip of paper with a protective arm as he’d pleaded with the heavens to make him normal—he’d always written them in his best handwriting, all loops and careful flicks of the pen that were never quite as graceful as his mother’s practised cursive. _If you tell anybody what you’ve wished for, it won’t come true,_ she’d warned him in her storyteller’s voice, but he already knew the impossible wish that she let float away over the clifftops each year. He’d never told her that he knew, just in case.

“Like wishing on shooting stars,” Rey murmured, moving to sit on the fountain’s marble bench. An image that she hadn’t intended to let loose unfurled across the bond, and he saw her, smaller and skinny-limbed, leaning against a sunken AT-AT and whispering a chant to the listening constellations. _My mother, my father, my home,_ the memory-Rey mouthed, until her eyelids became too heavy for her to carry on. “Did any of yours ever happen?”

“No,” Ben replied, forcing a matter-of-fact lilt into his voice. She nodded once and glanced away from him, as if to say _neither did mine_ without upsetting herself by speaking it aloud. With a rueful frown, he sagged down beside her, a spray of fine mist from the fountain cooling his cheeks. “This isn’t a solution,” he told her softly.

“It might not be, but it’s better than what we had this morning,” she insisted. “We can figure the rest out later.” For perhaps a minute, she was quiet, the silence between them more powerful to his ears than the fireworks, then she asked, “You spent most of your childhood here on Naboo, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “Except for when my mother had to travel off-world for important Senate meetings, and then I’d go with her.”

“I know if I lived here, I wouldn’t ever want to leave.” Her voice went dreamy, and he noticed the rapid flicker of her eyes scanning her surroundings, trying to take in every detail before she had to wake up. “What was it like, growing up here?”

“On the other side of the city, there’s cliffs—” he gestured, not towards the waterfalls crashing down into sparkling moonlit pools, but past the statues and turquoise-and-white buildings, “—that lead down to the Lake County. My family owns a retreat there—Varykino—on an island in the midst of endless meadows overflowing with more flowers than you could ever count. I—I think you’d love it there,” he added, the words catching in his throat. “I never went to school. My parents had me tutored, though none of them wanted to stick around for very long.” They’d tried at first, he was sure, but he’d picked up on their thoughts without meaning to, experiencing every scathing _what a strange boy,_ every flash of irritation when he struggled, and every prickle of fear from teaching a Force-sensitive child so soon after Vader. He halted before saying in a hurry, “You know almost everything about me and yet I don’t know enough about you.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” Rey replied with a wistful smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m not sure what there is to tell you. If I was lucky, I’d find computer chips and holos in the wrecks I scavenged, and I taught myself almost everything I know from those.” Her shoulders had slumped, but now they straightened in pride, her voice strengthening as she kept going. “I wanted to better understand traders at Niima Outpost who didn’t speak Basic, and I needed _something_ to do during the X’us’R’iia—those are Jakku’s sandstorms; the worst ones could keep you inside for a week—so I learned languages from old training programs. And I learned to make and fix things, but that was less because I could and more because I had to.”

“What kinds of things?”

_“Everything.”_ She gave him a pleased white-toothed grin, and his pulse sped up, hurling itself against his ribs so hard that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d felt it from beside him, as though his heart wanted nothing more than to get to her. “I found a Ghtroc 690 freighter in the Badlands and spent a year making it spaceworthy, but—” Cutting herself off, she shook her head, and Ben knew the momentary soreness in her eyes enough to decide not to pry. “Anyway, I built my speeder myself—and the best part was: nobody could steal it from me, because it couldn’t be powered on without _my_ fingerprint, and anybody who tried would get an electric shock.”

It had been a long while since he’d allowed himself to relax, but sitting with her and sliding into an easy conversation—about her skills with mechanics, what he knew in return, and how they’d both dreamed of spacefaring, flying with only the stars for company—had the tension ebbing from his body, and the more she spoke, the more the yearning tumult that she’d been in the bond since the morning began to calm. In real life, they were Ben Organa, blood of queens and princesses and war heroes and Jedi, and Rey of Jakku, uprooted from the desert to find the galaxy resting on her shoulders, but here, he felt almost _free._ Here, in this lantern-lit memory of Naboo, they were just Ben and Rey, breathing in the millaflowers’ sweet perfume and talking like a pair of friends.

“Have you ever thought about what you want to do after all of this is over?” she asked, her gaze drifting back to the fireworks, which burst and shimmered into the emblem of the Royal House of Naboo. Sparks of coloured light rained down, fizzling out before they hit the ground. “After the war ends and Snoke is gone?”

“I… haven’t considered any kind of afterwards,” he replied. It was the truth: Snoke still seemed untouchable, and when he’d never known his absence, the idea of him being _gone_ sounded impossible.

“There must be _something,”_ Rey pushed, turning to face him again, her brows furrowing. “You’ve got to have at least one thing to hope for, or else you won’t be able to go on.”

“Then I would just like to be my own,” Ben admitted at last, so quietly that he almost couldn’t hear his words over the fireworks and the fountain. He stared at his hands, shying away from the feel of her eyes on him. “To not be able to feel Snoke anymore,” he continued, uncertain of why her presence made him _want_ to talk and to sit there with her until dawn. “He’s always been there, so I—I wonder what it’d feel like. Peaceful, I think.”

Rey leaned back against the bench and said nothing for a time, until she asked, “You know what my hope is?” Without giving him a chance to reply, she went on, “I want to see everything there is to see in the galaxy. A lot of traders stopped by on Jakku, and they’d only hang around for a day or two, but they’d sit with us and tell us stories of all the planets they’d visited.” She looked up at him to gauge his interest, and a little smile twitched up her lips when she saw that she had his full attention. “Planets covered entirely with oceans and worlds where multicoloured lights dance in the sky all through winter, and even some places where the years are so long, the people there have to measure their age in months instead.” She huffed a short laugh, and a self-conscious _I’m talking too much aren’t I_ wove its way across the bond.

“No, it’s good that you’re talking,” Ben said, his ears going hot and red. Praying that she wouldn’t see, he tried to recover, hastily explaining, “The more we focus on the dream, the easier it is for me to control it and keep us here.” He met her eyes, saw that her smile had grown until dimples creased her freckled cheeks, and had to fight to hold her gaze. “Would you tell me more?”

“All right.” Her smile didn’t waver. “When I was younger, I’d sit around the campfires and listen for hours,” she started. “Musicians would play instruments they’d made from salvaged scrap metal, the travellers would tell old tales from wherever they’d been, and we’d all be spellbound, sharing around a portion of barrelbread and eating it together, each of us tearing off tiny pieces for ourselves.”

“What’s barrelbread?”

“It’s… I guess it’s a sort of sweet treat,” she told him, “or what passes for a sweet treat on a middle-of-nowhere desert rock. Only the hardiest of plants, like nightbloomers and spinebarrels, could survive on Jakku. Spinebarrels don’t look like much, but if you cut one open, they’re full of sap, so much that it drips all over your hands. It’s too sweet and syrupy to be a proper replacement for water, so on the rare, special occasions where we had enough to spare, we’d take a polystarch ration, slather it in sap, and leave it to dry for an hour or so. You end up with sticky, gooey bread that just about melts in your mouth, almost like a cake.” Her lips tightened, and something raw and sad glazed her bright eyes. “The food on Alinor is far better,” she said, hands knit over her stomach as if to soothe a phantom hunger pang.

Gritting his teeth, Ben quelled the impulse to inch closer, clasp her work-roughened hands in his, and—and _what?_ Murmur to her that he ought to have resisted Snoke as a boy, or not trusted Unkar Plutt to find her a home worthy of her, or flown her to somewhere beautiful and green instead? Promise her that she need never go empty-bellied again, or use the connections that doubtless came with the Organa name to present her with delicacies beyond her wildest, most indulgent dreams?

She’d already heard his apologies, and nothing that he could say or bring to her could alter the past, even if he wrote his wish onto paper, tucked it into a lantern, and let it soar away. All he could do was keep speaking to her and anchor them safely where they were until the morning came.

“What stories did they tell?” he asked. This time, he allowed himself to smile. “Were they better than mine?”

“You _did_ do the voices,” Rey admitted, “but the storytellers around the campfires had been _everywhere—_ or what felt like everywhere to me.”

When she described tales told in hushed half-reverent, half-frightened tones of a man who’d turned to the Dark Side then come back again, who was a saviour and a conqueror and a hero and a villain all at once, something in Ben’s gut flipped. She’d listened to the same stories that had captivated him as a boy, he realised: of Sith Lords whose wrathful spirits were sealed away under layers of stone for millennia until they broke free; of those who’d sought to make themselves immortal and come dangerously close; of twins both desiring one woman, becoming so consumed by their jealous anger at the other that they’d lashed out in the Force and destroyed themselves and the planet on which they stood; and of two lovers, one from the stars and the other from solid ground, who’d built a tower to the heavens to be together at last.

There was even a brief mention of a traditional Alderaanian air, one that he recognised in an instant. Rey couldn’t remember its name, only its plot, but he knew it as ‘Tialga Hath Fallen’, about a warrior-queen who’d faced down impossible odds and sacrificed her life without a second thought so that her children could reach safe haven.

“It’s called ‘Tialga Hath Fallen’,” he told her, his fingers automatically drumming its slow, marching beat on his knee. “You’d have heard it from me first; I used to sing it for you when we were young.”

“I remember,” she said. “I think it might have been my favourite, but you never liked it very much, did you? I’d have to beg for you to sing it for me and you’d heave a big sigh, roll your eyes, and give in.”

“The lyrics aren’t the most cheerful,” Ben pointed out. “According to my mother, it was often performed at funerals, and she’d heard it played at memorials for Alderaan so many times, she stopped being able to stand it.” _There’s two billion people to mourn and I’m just one woman,_ he’d overheard her hoarse voice saying as he’d pressed his cheek to the wall, _and none of them except for my parents got to have their own funerals. In what universe is that fair, Han?_ “How a five-year-old could _enjoy_ such a solemn song about a dying queen is beyond me.”

“Because, to me, it was optimistic in spite of that.” Rey was grinning at him now. “We’d bicker about it, remember?” she prompted, but he’d never forgotten. “You’d say ‘but Tialga _died,_ Rey,’ as solemn as the song itself, and I’d frown up at you, put my hands on my hips, and argue with you about how it ends with such hope for her children.”

As she spoke, a thought came into his mind that he couldn’t shake off, and nor did he want to be rid of it. Illuminated by the fireworks and the soft candlelight glow of a thousand paper lanterns, she looked more alive than anybody he’d seen in fifteen years. Untamed. _Beautiful._ She looked beautiful, like she had in the rain with his palms cradling her freckled cheeks, her eyelashes water-jewelled and her damp nut-brown locks stuck to her forehead, and like she had on Boreas, when she’d stood over him as he’d lain on the ice and refused to kill him, gold-flecked eyes ablaze and Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber thrumming in her hands.

He—and the unfamiliar part of him that had wanted to dip his head and brush his lips against hers as the downpour soaked them to the skin—craved her presence, but knew that if he were a better man, he’d stay far away, lest he drag her down with him. His worldview had been shattered and there were scant certainties for him to cling to, but he was sure of one thing: when he awoke, he’d have her entranced face burned into the backs of his eyelids, as she’d been braided into him since he’d met her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Ben's got it _bad,_ huh? As always, thank you so much for reading!
> 
> When Ben suggests that Rey might have experienced something awful in her early life and made herself forget it, he's referring to a phenomenon called [flashburn](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Flashburn), where a Force-sensitive—intentionally or not—shuts down areas of their mind connected to a traumatic event.
> 
> I've mostly invented the differences between Light Side and Dark Side healing for the purposes of this fic, but there is reference to Dark Side healing being only temporary in [Legends](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_healing/Legends). 
> 
> Naboo has three moons: [Ohma-D'un](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ohma-D%27un), [Rori](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rori), and [a tiny third unnamed moon](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Third_moon_of_Naboo).
> 
> The emblem of the Royal House of Naboo looks like [this](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Royal_House_of_Naboo).
> 
> All of the stories Rey mentions are either about real events (and people) in-universe, or inspired by them! In particular, the one about the twins who both fell in love with the same woman is a [myth](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Twins_\(Jedi\)) passed down as a cautionary tale for young Jedi, showing them the consequences of letting their emotions cloud their judgement. The (much happier) story about the two lovers is inspired by the Nabooian myth of [Set](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Set) and [Veré](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ver%C3%A9), who sounded to me like they could be a _Star Wars_ Romeo and Juliet, and Jakku's storytellers probably added the bit about the tower to the sky themselves. 
> 
> [Tialga Hath Fallen](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tialga_Hath_Fallen) is an Alderaanian air.


	9. The Dawn Between

For the first time in what felt like forever, Rey awoke with a smile on her lips that didn’t fade away once she realised where she was.

As the day wore on, she kept remembering the perfect dream-Naboo that Ben had crafted to keep the two of them safe, and unlike her wolf-dream or the one that she’d had in the  _Starbird’_ s bunk, where somebody had called her their  _star-child,_ it didn’t leave her wistful and wanting.

Luke had them meditating that morning, cross-legged under a constellation of gorsa blossoms and atop storm-soaked grass that hurried to dry itself when he asked with a gentle sweep of his hand. When she closed her eyes, her thoughts drifted to fireworks shaped like flowers and symbols and great-winged birds, paper lanterns with hearts’ desires tucked inside, and the delicious  _smells,_ all of them still so real to her—gunpowder, the delicate perfume of flowers, fresh-cut grass, and the mouth-watering tang of the fried snack foods that had once been sold to hungry festivalgoers. Hours later, when she slid into bed, pulling open the curtains for the moonlight to stream in, she let those same thoughts lull her to sleep, sure that if her dreams spun themselves into nightmares again, Ben would be there for her, and if his past came back to haunt him, she’d fend it off for him.

And yet, when her consciousness reached out on its own and sought the familiar silvery thread of his, a wave of powerful Dark Side energy that didn’t belong to him almost knocked her backwards. Earlier, he’d burned full-moon-bright in the Force, clouded here and there with shifting shades of grey, but now, he was so dim that she had to strain to see him, as though something or some _one_ was trying to snuff him out.

_There you are, Kylo Ren,_ whispered a voice into Ben’s mind, sending a flurry of chills knifing down her spine. Cold—not bitter winter-cold, but what she could only describe as  _death-cold,_ the kind that pierced into her veins and made her feel like she’d never be warm again—surrounded her as the presence coiled up her body, hissing taunts into her ears.  _Didn’t you know that I’d never give you up, my dear child,_ it asked,  _not even if I had to tear the entire galaxy apart just to find you?_

_No,_ Rey thought at Snoke, the word a bright spark of a shout. Distantly, and yet so close by that his pulse raced a call-and-response to hers, she felt Ben struggling to break free. His refusal to give in and let Snoke  _take_ spurred her into fighting for him, not registering how her fists clenched in the sheets, her teeth gritted enough to grind like metal on metal, and her whole body tensed, drawn as tight as a bowstring from head to toe.  _You can’t have him,_ she snarled, as if Ben were precious salvage and not a man—a boy; he’d been a boy once, a frightened child who’d never stood a chance. A man who’d done terrible things, but said in such a soft, earnest voice as they’d watched the fireworks,  _I would just like to be my own,_ and kept talking, oblivious to the funny little pang that had gripped her heart.

She’d felt it before, how Snoke searched, rifling through a person’s thoughts and ripping out whatever he pleased. On Elan, the pain of it had intensified until it became a physical part of her, and when Ben’s nose had started to drip with a thin stream of blood, she’d been certain that she’d die right there and then, bent double in the pouring rain.

As thorn-sharp fingernails raked like claws through their linked minds, hunting for one thing in particular, Rey shoved it down deep and fought not to cry out, a lump growing in her throat that had nothing to do with how much it hurt.

Even in his dreams, Ben was trying his best to hide their location, locking away Alinor’s ranges of snow-capped mountains, forests fragrant with wildflowers, lakes with mirror-clear waters, and the base itself. Instead, he forced anything that could throw Snoke off to the forefront of his mind: arid deserts sweltering under a pair of suns, rolling wheat-gold plains, sprawling cities with people packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and asteroid fields with a secret base concealed on each rock. The Resistance would be wiped out within a matter of hours if Snoke discovered where they were—or even which system they were in, for surely he’d have no qualms about bombing a dozen planets if he suspected that they could be on one—but Ben was  _protecting_ them, her and Leia and Luke and thousands of other people who, for all he knew, still thought him a monster.

_You, my proudest achievement, owe everything that you are to me,_ Snoke thundered over the ringing in her ears, digging in until a haze of stars popped before her eyes.  _And still, you remain ungrateful; you repay me by abandoning me and betraying me, when it was I who_ made  _you. How many times must I remind you that you’re mine?_

_He told you himself on Elan: he’s not yours,_ Rey insisted, surprised by the ferocity that roughened her voice to a near-growl. The night before, Ben had chased away the sand that had closed around her throat and crushed the air from her lungs, and in its place, he’d given her one of his most treasured memories of Naboo, a dream-world so beautiful that she’d wanted to keep hold of every detail and savour it, turning it over and over like a sweet on her tongue. She’d needed him then, and he needed her now, she decided, setting her jaw and pushing the roiling Darkness away with all the Light that she could find in herself.  _He’s never been yours to own, and you_ know  _that—that’s why you came to him as a child, isn’t it? Because he wouldn’t understand that there was another way, would he?_

Snoke ignored her, brushing her off as easily as if she were as tiny as a skittermouse running underfoot.  _You don’t belong here,_ he said to Ben, and there was nobody alive who could have mistaken the syrup-sweet tone of his voice for genuine kindness. A flash-fast flit of a memory pressed itself against her eyelids: a terrified boy with a bird’s-nest mop of raven-black curls, huddling under his blankets with his hands covering his ears.  _You see them laughing, joking, and loving, but that will never be you. You will never be one of them._ Then, he showed them Ben ducking his head and picking at his meal in a secluded corner of the cafeteria, buffeted by the ebb and flow of strangers’ chatter.  _It’s not yours to have, Kylo Ren,_ Snoke told him almost gently, as though—Rey could have laughed aloud in disgust—trying to protect him.  _You’re meant to be by my side, not pretending to be like the rest._

_He’s lying to you,_ Rey called out to Ben, desperate for him to believe it.  _That’s what he does, right? Lies and lies and builds you up, then breaks you down until you feel like there’s nothing left for you but him?_

_I was_ never  _meant to be yours._ There was a raw fierceness to Ben’s voice that she’d never heard before, not even when they’d fought for the first time, and it made him sound so startlingly unlike the man who’d told her of Naboo’s traditions and listened to her with real interest as she’d talked of her life on Jakku until they’d both stirred awake.  _You never gave me a choice,_ he went on, quieter and lower with hurt. His words hitched, a hairsbreadth from cracking, but he sucked in a shuddering breath and kept going, siphoning strength from some fathoms-deep well inside him.  _I wanted more, more than to just be your pawn, but you took that life from me before I was even a year old._

_Do not try to deceive yourself, my boy,_ Snoke murmured,  _for you and I both know that you would have come to me all the same._

A white-hot flare of Ben’s anger blazed in the Force, and Rey could have sworn that Snoke’s presence shrank away from it, recoiling just enough to give her a brief moment of reprieve.  _You’re wrong!_ Ben shouted, though waves of fear whipped and churned the gossamer threads of the bond, and across it, shivery snippets of  _but what if he isn’t what if I was always destined to fall what if he never lets me go_  darted towards her.

_Luke Skywalker would never have been able to give you what you needed, would he? The Dark Side is far too strong in you for that, boy, and in time, when he inevitably disappointed you, you would have found your way to me and begged for me to teach you._ Sensing that inkling of doubt before Ben could make himself quash it, Snoke shifted his cadence to danger-soft and continued,  _I received you as a mere child, Kylo Ren, but you would still have sought me as a man. And I would have taken you in and cared for you as if you were my own, boy or man._

_Cared for me?_ Ben repeated with a choked noise that was half a scoff, half a sob.  _You don’t have the capacity to care for me,_ he spat.  _I was warned, but I ought to have seen the truth when you allowed Enyo Ren to challenge me: all that matters to you is what you can use me for._

_Look at you, shunning me and clinging to those who’d rather you be somebody else,_ Snoke taunted him, abandoning all pretences and speaking to him as though he were nothing.  _They don’t want_ you,  _broken, dark thing that you are; they want a version of you who could never have existed. They want a perfect Ben Organa with no blood on his hands, an obedient, easy-to-love son and not a killer, and soon, they’ll realise how little you’re worth without my guidance._ Light-years away, Rey could almost see the jagged, cruel smile creeping up his scarred lips, and it made her want to vomit, imagining a young boy hearing such vile words and—worse, far worse— _believing_ them.  _But how much are their lives worth to_ you,  _Kylo Ren? Your mother, alive now only because of your ridiculous soft-hearted soul? Your coward of an uncle, who fled the very instant his plans to rebuild the Jedi failed? The slip of a scavenger you betrayed me for? Never forget that I can take all of them from you._

Shards of dread spiked into Ben’s veins and ran cold in her blood, but he held fast, refusing to give Snoke the reaction he wanted. Clamping down on his fear and hiding it away, he instead gave an almighty  _shove,_ battling against Snoke with every last bit of him until his heartbeat roared in her ears and in her chest alongside her own. Rey steeled herself and joined him, letting loose a furious  _get out!_ that resounded like a thunderclap. Somehow, by some miracle, they managed to push Snoke out, and as his presence cleared away like fog, the storm in their minds dwindled to a blanket of silence so heavy that she could hear her lungs working hard enough to burst.

Her eyes flickered open to find herself as safe as she could possibly be, though when she clutched her chest to calm herself, her pulse hammered underneath her palm like the wings of a massive bird. Every inch of her body thrummed staticky with adrenaline and her throat felt rough and raspy, as if she’d cried out, but with clarity that sunk like a stone to the pit of her stomach, Rey understood that nobody would have heard her if she’d screamed. The walls were so thick that the only person who could have heard her would have been Ben, and he’d have felt it lancing through the bond—

— _Ben._ Some part of her—or a part that wasn’t her own but felt almost indistinguishable from the rest of her—knew that he’d awoken with a strangled shout ripping itself out of his mouth, jolted upright just as she had, and whirled his gaze around the room with terror-wild eyes and wilder sleep-mussed hair.

As awareness returned to him, his gratitude flooded into her, pooling warmth in the spaces between her ribs.  _Thank you,_ he said hoarsely, so sincere that it left her without breath for a moment, and when he spoke again, she could  _see_ him, almost—but not quite—real enough to reach out and touch. He was a near-perfect mirror of her: one large hand was fisted tight in his blankets, while he’d pressed the other to the very centre of his chest, as if to keep his heart contained inside.  _Nobody… nobody’s ever been able to do that for me before,_ he told her, swallowing around the words.  _I was always alone to face it. To face him._

Words came to her and spilled from her lips before she knew what she was saying. They felt right—vital, even—and so she didn’t try to stop herself.  _You’re not alone now,_ she reassured him,  _and you won’t ever be again._

_Neither will you,_ he replied at once, the pure conviction in his voice making her ache for it to be true.

While the layer of sweat on her skin cooled, Rey blinked against the light of the full moon pouring through the window, giving a soft, silver-edged glow to her collection of picked flowers. Dawn hadn’t yet broken to paint rosy-gold streaks through the sky, which was a comforting, velvety kind of dark, patterned with watercolour dabs of clouds and speckled with stars like far-flung pearls from a snapped string. She chewed the inside of her cheek and absently stroked her gorsa cutting with a fingertip, thinking of Ben and how the blackness of the night must have been even more frightening for a young boy jerking awake from a nightmare of strange voices; how every shadow must have elongated until it could have been swooping towards him to snatch him up. How she’d have fallen, too, if Snoke had wanted her; if he’d found her in Jakku’s wastes and promised to make her a  _something_ from a nothing.

She searched for a way to tell Ben that Snoke had been wrong, so wrong, that there was a place for him, and that he  _was_ wanted, by a mother and an uncle who loved him more than she could imagine. By  _her._ In the end, unable to find the words, she settled for whispering,  _You know he was lying, don’t you?_ across the bond.

Ben didn’t answer her in words. Instead, he sent her a series of images that unfurled and played for her, filling her with such peace that she couldn’t help but smile. A beautiful woman—Rey saw her shimmery river-gown and the star-shaped flowers woven into her tumble of curls and recognised her as Padmé Amidala—with kind, sad eyes to match Leia’s and Ben’s. Han Solo, blue-limned and sporting a crooked grin that positively shone with pride. Leia clutching Ben close, her head buried in his chest and him crumbling over her, as if despite her being shorter by over a foot, she could anchor him and keep him standing. Luke from that morning’s training session, flashing him a quick, warm smile before they sat to meditate amongst the goldening autumn leaves.  _Herself,_ her lips tilted up in a beam, her features lit up by lantern-light and many-hued fireworks.

Rey grasped what he was trying to say in an instant: he was beginning to understand that everything that Snoke had taught him had been a lie, however shakily, however much he still thought himself a monster, and beginnings were as good as anything.

 

* * *

 

Poe and Jessika Pava had gone off-planet on a supply run, so later that morning found a bleary-eyed Rey in the cafeteria with Finn, eating breakfast in contemplative silence, her encounter with Snoke weighing on her mind so heavily that she had no space for thoughts of anything else. The doors opened with a hiss, and over a mouthful of crisp nuna bacon and scrambled pelikki eggs, she watched Ben slope in, pick up a tray, and take his usual position in a less-occupied corner of the room. Hers were the only pair of eyes that didn’t track his every movement with a prey animal’s wariness. Instead, while he set to his food—he was eating more now, at least; actual platefuls with, from what she could tell, scarcely any scraps left behind—she frowned at him.

“Organa over there looks lonely, huh?” Spoken in a tone that she couldn’t decipher, the sound of Finn’s voice startled her from her reverie. He took a sip of his sun-apple juice and twisted his mouth in thought, eyeing Ben as if he were a puzzle that he couldn’t quite work out. “He never ate with the rest of us on Starkiller Base or on the  _Finalizer,_ either. I used to hear high-ranking officers complaining about him—they reckoned that he thought he was better than them—but some of us thought he might be a droid, or some species that didn’t need to eat solid food.” With a short huff of a laugh, he added, “And there were those of us who thought he drank blood, or brains—you know, like an Anzat.”

“And what did you think?” Rey asked, fighting the urge to let her gaze drift back to Ben. She could feel him through the bond like a phantom limb; every so often, second-hand prickles of anxiousness needled at her skin, rippling the silver and gold cords that tied them together.

Finn shot her a rueful smile. “Me? That he didn’t want to be seen as human. He’d have to take that bucket off his head to eat in front of us, wouldn’t he? Then we’d all know who—or what—he was.”

Rey speared a rasher of bacon with her fork and pushed it half-heartedly around her plate, then gave in and glanced up at Ben, who’d hunched over his meal in a vain attempt to appear smaller. Strands of coal-dark hair shadowed his eyes, hiding them from view, but that did nothing to obscure his emotions: his shoulders were strung so tight that anybody who looked his way would notice, as though he’d prepared himself to spring up at any moment. “Or Snoke didn’t want him to be seen as human,” she murmured, trying not to flinch at the stab of anger that heated up in her middle and made her hands curl into fists. “I’m going to go and sit with him,” she told Finn. “Are you coming?”

“I, uh… I think I need more time before I can entertain the possibility of doing that,” he replied after looking over at Ben, studying him, and shaking his head. Returning his gaze to her, he met her eyes and asked, “He’s different, isn’t he? You can feel him changing without Snoke, can’t you, through the Force?”

A dozen different explanations brimmed on the tip of her tongue and fluttered like moths’ wings against her lips, demanding to be let free, but she kept her mouth shut and answered him with a nod. Perhaps he’d be more willing if she told him about the dream that she and Ben had shared, where he’d conjured up Naboo for her and, soft-eyed and earnest, listened to her ramble on about things that ought to have bored him—how they’d made barrelbread from rations and spinebarrel sap; the stories she’d heard around the campfires; what she’d built from salvage; the constellations she’d created for herself as she’d leaned against her downed AT-AT—but she couldn’t bring herself to speak of it. Childish and possessive as it felt, she wanted the memory of it to be  _hers,_ just for a little longer.

“Well, I might not trust him yet, but I trust you,” Finn said with a small, hesitant smile. “Besides, I heard from Connix that he exposed the senators for Arkanis and Comra as secret First Order supporters, and they’ve just… vanished. On the run, probably, with a bounty on their heads big enough to buy each of us here a top-level apartment on Coruscant. And—” he paused to drag in a breath, the awfulness of his past piling up on his shoulders until they drooped, “—he gave us the location of four training bases for stormtroopers-to-be, and Statura says that we ought to have freed the children inside by the end of the week. Thousands of kids who wouldn’t have had a hotshot pilot turn up when they needed one like I did, who’d have one day been blaster fodder for us, and now they’ll be going home to what families they’ve got left.”

There was a growing thickness to his voice by the time he finished talking, and it made something in Rey’s chest clench, as if he’d reached across the table and squeezed her already-raw heart hard. She tried to imagine the overwhelming mixture of shock, confusion, and bittersweet joy that a young person would experience upon learning that they had a birth name—and not a string of letters and numbers—to go by, a home planet to discover, and siblings and actual  _parents_ to love, but no matter what she pictured, it felt like it would come nowhere close to the reality.

A dull throbbing in her jaw brought her out of her own head and grounded her: without realising it, she’d gritted her teeth, guarding herself against the ache that always followed whenever she allowed herself to think about who her family might have been. If they’d really named her Aurelia, if she’d seen the shape of them in her dreams, and if they’d wanted her. Standing so suddenly that Finn jolted, she said, “I’ll see you after I’m done training, all right?”

Finn looked beyond her and waved to somebody, beckoning them—Rey aimed a glance over her shoulder and saw that Snap was strolling towards them, a smudge of grease swiped across his cheek and a stack of slices of toast teetering on his tray—then grinned up at her. “I’m sure I can find it in myself to forgive you for the terrible crime of leaving me to eat breakfast with Temmin Wexley, who I’m pretty certain likes his X-wing more than he likes most people, on the condition that we play a game of dejarik later.”

Rey echoed his grin. “Deal.”

Taking her tray and her drink with her, she wove through the maze of tables until she got to where Ben sat, holding her chin high and ignoring the countless stares that seared into the nape of her neck. Whispers of  _what’s she doing_ and  _why is she sitting with_ him  _of all people_ and  _do you think it’s a good sign if she isn’t afraid of him_ and  _if I were her, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything_ bounced off her back like beads of water.

Ben whipped his head up when she sat herself down opposite him, furrowed his black eyebrows as if to see into her and gauge her intentions, then offered her a tiny twitch of a smile that  _shouldn’t_ have sent a glow of candle-flame warmth suffusing through her, but did nonetheless.  _He has a nice smile,_ she found herself thinking, caught off-guard by the thought: it was slow and unsure but  _there_ all the same, carving out two little dimples beside his full lips.  _And—_ privately, the corners of her mouth quirked up— _he has a definite sweet tooth._ Several opened sachets of sugar lay next to his steaming cup of caf, and he’d poured a lake of red flushberry jam over his toast and topped it with a neat, half-melted pat of butter.

As she started on what remained of her meal, all without having spoken a single word, his wound-up shoulders relaxed to a slackness that seemed almost comfortable, as though her mere presence calmed him. The veil of silence that fell around them as they ate together felt like a cosy one between friends—like those between her and Finn, or Poe, or Jess—and when she broke it once they’d cleared their plates, it wasn’t out of unease but out of a genuine desire to talk to him.

“So,” she began, keeping her voice light, “how are you feeling about being around here with us?”

“A better question,” Ben replied after a sip of caf, “would have been to ask how everyone else is feeling about me being around here with  _them.”_ He flicked his eyes up and scanned the room: now, nobody dared so much as peek their way. “You’ve noticed, haven’t you, that they never seem to think quietly, and that their every thought about you might as well be a shout directly into your ear? Some are warming to the idea of me after hearing of Corellia and the information I provided, while a few still itch to shoot me themselves. Most are cautious, which I’d be a fool not to understand, but they see you and Luke with me and start to change their minds.” For a moment, he paused, then held her gaze and emphasised,  _“Especially_ you, Rey.”

“Because I’m Rey with the entire galaxy counting on me,” she said with a sigh. “Because they need me to not mess up, even though I barely know what I’m doing.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but it’s a lot for one person to live up to, isn’t it?” His voice lowered, adopting a softness that most in the cafeteria would have believed impossible coming from him. “They don’t—they don’t expect perfection from you, but you and Luke are the closest things to sources of hope that many of them have.” He clenched his fist atop the table, as if he were trying to restrain himself from reaching out to her—and what kind of person did it make her if she  _wanted_ him to let her lay her hand in his? “Look,” he murmured.

Across the bond came an image, edged in his luminous silver-grey. When she let it in, it unfolded to reveal a memory of a civilian—a man so ordinary-looking that he could have slipped by her a hundred times—marching through the corridors, glaring in a not-so-subtle manner that, if stares could kill, would have launched a hail of daggers towards Ben’s forehead.

“He thinks the Resistance ought to have pushed for my execution,” he explained once the memory had faded. “When the news of my lenient sentence broke, he questioned several high-ranking members of staff and attempted to argue for the death penalty, or at least imprisonment for life, but each informed him that the decision had been made.”

Rey bristled, knowing that she’d never be able to think such a thing about him, not now. “He had no right.”

Shrugging with feigned matter-of-factness, Ben said in a toneless voice, “It’s not unreasonable.” He sensed the  _why_ building up at the back of her throat, threatening to burst off her tongue, and continued, “People are angry, and their anger towards me is valid after all I’ve done. Nobody here is under any obligation to forgive me or even tolerate my company.” Perhaps it was just her imagination, but that last part seemed pointed at her, as if he were telling her  _you don’t have to sit with me just because I have nobody; you can leave if you want to and I won’t try to stop you._

“That may be so,” she protested, almost loud enough to be overheard, “but they shouldn’t just want to see you killed!”

“The man I showed you—he had a sister living on Hosnian Prime when—” Ben cut himself off with a heavy gulp of a swallow, refusing to finish his sentence. “She was young, too young for a fate like that. Now, he wants every member and every supporter of the First Order to face the consequences, regardless of whether they were involved in the use of Starkiller Base. I might have loathed that weapon, but how could he know that, and why should he care if knowing wouldn’t undo her death?”

“Well, he can carry on wanting you dead all he likes,” Rey told him firmly. “He won’t be getting it.”

At that, Ben blinked in surprise, then curled his lips into the biggest and brightest smile that he’d ever given her—in this life, at least. Not so long ago, she might have seen it—all crooked white teeth and half-moon dimples—and mourned for the Ben Organa who’d never had the chance to exist, who she might have grown up with on Nysa, but as the bond between them hummed with his pleasure, she let herself smile back.

Right before her, the tips of his ears tinting pink as he took a lengthy, self-conscious swig of caf, was a Ben Organa who  _could_ be so much more.

 

* * *

 

A week passed with total silence from Snoke, and with no nightmares to fling him awake, but Ben knew not to dare let himself hope. He dreamed sometimes of a dark-haired boy running through the meadows of Naboo and into a laughing Leia Organa’s arms; other times of shadow-bathed silhouettes holding aloft lightsabers with blades in a spectrum of colours, from yellows to greens to purples; and once of the barest glimpse of Rey-but-not-Rey—a Rey several years older, freckled and golden-skinned and incandescently happy, barefoot and draped in a gown embroidered with winding leaves and silvery blossoms that caught the sun as she moved. Still, each night, he scanned the landscapes of those sweet dreams with wary eyes, waiting for them to turn horrifying, and each day, he prised himself out of bed and tried to readjust to how Luke taught.

If Rey made a wrong move—if she fumbled between one form and the next, or if she dropped and shattered the log that she’d been balancing in mid-air with sheer concentration alone—Luke flashed her a gentle smile and helped her until she could do it, rather than scolding her and hissing  _weak, foolish, worthless_ into her ears until she believed him. When she grew thirsty under the pale golden light of the early autumn sun, Luke let her drink. If she were to get hurt again, Luke would see to it that her wound be mended, not teach her how to dig her fingernails into it and focus on the pain until it became all that she was.

After lunch, he was heading to his quarters when whispers bearing both of his names wormed themselves through those thoughts. Before he knew what he was doing, he slowed his strides to listen.

_—that’s him, the Jedi Killer—_

_—murderer—_

_—how many—_

_—killed his own father—_

_—cold blood—_

_—don’t give a damn if he wasn’t the one who gave the order to fire; he still walked amongst them—_

_—why should saving the General make up for any of his crimes—_

_It shouldn’t,_ Ben thought bitterly, his blood boiling scalding-hot both at their barbed words and at the fact that they were all true,  _and it won’t._ He didn’t allow himself to add that some sick part of him, the one that had asked  _what if Snoke’s right and you were always meant for him,_ hoped that no matter what he did, he’d never make up for what he’d done.

More than anything—short of his yearning to have let his father lead him home from Starkiller Base—he wished for Padmé’s spirit to guide him.  _The Naboo remember you as a hero; they call you brave as well as kind and speak of how, even when the galaxy fell to pieces around you, you kept your head held high. How did you do it?_ he’d ask her.  _How did you find it in yourself to keep going?_

The corridors hummed with noise around him, vibrating with low murmurs of  _Kylo Ren Jedi Killer Ben Organa_ and the threads of other conversations that he cared nothing for, but his ghosts were silent. They’d been silent ever since that day aboard the  _Finalizer,_ when Han Solo had told him to go home and he’d listened at last, but he needed them now. His pulse slammed against his veins, as though his heart couldn’t decide whether it wanted him to flee—to shrink away to his quarters and grind his knuckles into his ribs until they bruised to quiet it—or to whirl around, wrap tendrils of the Force around the whisperers’ middles, and fling them against the base’s clean chrome-white walls.

His palms itched, but in the end, he did neither.

Before he could take another step, something, or some _one,_ gave him a quick tug—a tug like they’d actually pulled at the back of his shirt to steer him in a different direction. When he spun on his heels, breathing in the faintest wisps of woodsmoke and spiced cologne and well-worn nerf-leather, the faces of the whisperers behind him drained of all colour and the fury-bright fire in their eyes blew itself out. Shaping with his lips a soundless  _thank you_ that would never be enough, he marched past them towards the training room that Luke had suggested he use with Rey.

A warm rush of gratitude swept from his crown to his soles as soon as he shut the door behind him: Luke had seen to it that the room be stocked full of everything they might need. Punching bags dangled from the ceiling, powered-down combat droids with bowed heads and limp arms lined one wall, and in a corner, a piled-up stack of firm mats towered to almost twice his height. Beside them was a rack of dumbbells and a barrel boasting an assortment of weapons, including training sabers, low-voltage electrostaffs, plasteel quarterstaffs, and smooth wooden sticks in varying lengths, some as long as a double-bladed lightsaber. On a shelf tucked away to the side lay rolls of wraps to protect their hands, empty canteens for water, a box of nutrition bars, and even a pot of bacta gel no larger than his smallest finger, just in case.

Ben wrapped his hands and began hammering his fists into a punching bag, pummelling it until sweat prickled on his forehead and the spikes in his heart rate came from the exercise alone. He must have been there for about five minutes before Rey’s golden presence spilled into the room like a sunrise, her footsteps dune-soft as she walked in, and with a wrench of guilt that made him hit the bag so hard that it jolted, he supposed that the tumult of his emotions must have bled into her through the bond and led her to seek him out.

They hadn’t asked for the Force to bind them, but there was no escaping that  _she_ was the one stuck with  _him._ And if that was the case, what did it say about him that he didn’t want it to ever be broken? That he was reassured by the ever-present rhythm of her heartbeat entwining with his, and that seeing her in his dreams made them feel, for the first time in his life, almost as if they could be a safe place?

Though she said nothing to him, his breath came a fraction easier to have her nearby. He swiped the back of his hand over his brow, pausing to watch out of the corner of an eye as she shucked off her green jacket, folded it up, and placed it on the shelf in a neat little bundle. It was a tiny gesture—and likely done without a second thought—but something in the extraordinary care with which she treated her things brought a real ache to his chest, which hurried to fade away once she turned around and his mouth went dry at the sight of the rest of her.

He couldn’t help but stare: without the jacket, all that covered her upper half was a thin tank top that clung to her lean form and exposed sharp collarbones and paler skin at her clavicle, but even those parts of her that hadn’t caught so much of Jakku’s sun still glowed as though she were lit from the inside. Galaxies of tawny freckles were dusted over shoulders and arms patterned at random with comet-streaks of old silver scars.

Mercifully oblivious to his gaze, Rey picked a saberstaff-sized wooden stick from the barrel of weapons, examined the weight of it in her hands, and slipped into the opening stance for Shii-Cho. Her body moved with the fluidity of water as she progressed through the seven forms, and if he were a better man, he wouldn’t have been so distracted by the strength in her biceps and the way her eyes narrowed and her jaw set in determination. Ripping himself away from her and scowling at the punching bag before him, he tried to focus, each flurry-fast landed strike drumming to echo the pounding in his veins.

_Don’t tuck your thumb in like that, kid,_ Han Solo’s voice said, straight from a memory. In his mind’s eye, his father held out a plump pillow for him to hit. Normal children his age were taught to write their names in unsteady Aurebesh, read from holobooks with plenty of pictures, and colour within the lines of a drawing. As a five-year-old, Ben knew those things  _and,_ courtesy of Han, several beginner’s sleight-of-hand tricks for sabacc, how to pick a basic lock with a hairpin, and now, how to throw a good punch.  _If you do that, you’re gonna break it, and believe me, that won’t be a fun time._ When he got it right, Han flashed him a lopsided grin and ruffled his untidy curls.  _That’s my bandit right there! You know, if you tried the Jedi thing and it didn’t work out, well, the_ Falcon’ _s always got a place for you on board if you’ll have her—_

Hours could have passed with the two of them both lost in their own thoughts before Rey spoke at last, calling out a hesitant, “Ben?” that had him loosening his fists and facing her at once. A wrinkle had appeared between her brows, and she gripped the wooden stick tight enough to bleach her knuckles fishbelly-white. “What kind of weapon does Snoke fight with?”

“He doesn’t need one,” Ben replied. More memories tried to wrestle themselves free—of how easily hearts stopped and ribs snapped with the merest squeeze of a fist; of the crackle of lightning at Snoke’s fingertips that gave a split-second’s warning before pain blinded him and every nerve branching down his spine was set alight—and he shoved them away, but he must have stumbled, for Rey had made as though to move towards him, almost as if she cared for him. “The Force is his weapon,” he told her, his voice all of a sudden hoarse.  _Please,_ he implored Han, Padmé, Anakin, any eavesdropping ghosts,  _don’t let her have seen—_

Rey’s intake of breath was audible even from across the room. It shivered in the air between them until she swallowed to fortify herself and said, hushed as if sharing a secret, “I was going to ask what he can do, but I saw. Just then, I saw you…” Her eyes darted up to his, wide and stricken, wanting him to tell her that she was wrong.

Ben shook his head, regretting that he couldn’t give her that. “He had his ways of ensuring our obedience.” Venom honed his words to knife-points, both at how Snoke had manipulated him and at how he’d been such a fool not to have realised. “I thought myself special to him until he let Enyo Ren challenge me. Maybe he’d have intervened before she killed me, but—” he faltered mid-sentence, the truth of it unmooring him for a moment, “—but I was his for fifteen years, and I still don’t know what my purpose was. What he would have used me for after the First Order had conquered the galaxy and there were no more Force-sensitives to destroy.”

“Maybe it’s so awful that it’s better to not know,” Rey murmured. Her faraway tone made him wonder if she wasn’t talking about herself; about the fires and ringing bells in her dreams, and about the curious absence of all of her memories of her life before Nysa. “But the Knights of Ren were yours, weren’t they?” she asked him, blinking herself back to the present. “You were their master; if you asked, would they follow you?”

“I might have been their master, but it was in name only,” he admitted. “Snoke forbade me from taking on a student of my own, and so, though they obeyed me, it was under his orders. Above all, they were  _his_ apprentices, not mine.”

Rey cocked her head at him, furrowing her brows. “So you were defying him when you offered to teach me?”

“Yes, I was.” Unable to look her in the eye, Ben dipped his gaze and started to unravel his wraps, spending more time on it than necessary. “I didn’t realise until not long ago, but every time I rebelled against him, it was because of you,” he confessed softly, speaking to the back of one freed hand rather than to her face. “You showed me—no, you  _are_ showing me, every day—that there’s a way out; that there’s more out there for me than him.”

Just as he’d expected, she shook her head. “I’m not a good example,” she insisted, crinkling up her nose. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything besides be yourself,” he corrected her, giving her a tiny smile. “That’s the point: you weren’t even trying, but somehow, you still inspired me to want to be better.”

She was silent for what felt like an eternity after that, and as she busied herself with returning her wooden stick to the barrel, regret soured his insides: he’d said too much, and now he’d gone and spoiled the tenuous companionship between them. “Luke’s right,” she said eventually, and he gulped down the  _I’m sorry, please forget what I said_ that had been about to spill from behind his teeth. “Maybe the two of us training together wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

“You want to train with me?”

Her eyes lit up with a mischievous glint. “I don’t see anybody else in this room, do you?”

“A-all right,” Ben managed to get out. “Mats,” he added, a touch firmer, “we’ll need mats. I can’t let myself hurt you again.”

“It’s been more than a week and you’re still beating yourself up over that?” Rey’s mouth twitched in understanding, and she took a few steps forwards until she was so close that he could see the grass-and-gold flecks in her irises and, if the mad impulse had seized him, could have counted the freckles scattered over the bridge of her nose. “Look,” she urged him, holding out her wrist for him to inspect. He did, peering down at her arm: rivers of green-blue veins flowed up to the inside of her elbow, and yet more freckles formed star systems on her skin, but there was no evidence of the singe-mark from his training blade. “See? Not even the smallest scar. Anyway, it was only a training lightsaber, and it’s not as if you were  _actually_ trying to cut off my hand.”

“Of course I wasn’t,” he told her, striding towards the tower of mats in his eagerness to escape all thoughts of the  _nearness_ of her lips, “and the proper term for it is  _cho mai._ The Jedi used it to end a duel with no further loss of life or limb, and the Sith—” he let out a grunt as he hefted up a mat and placed it flat on the floor next to the wall, “—liked to use it to humiliate their opponents. Both would have called it a mercy.” Returning to the pile of mats, Ben levitated one using the Force instead, stealing a glance at Rey while he stacked it vertically atop the mat on the floor and leaned it against the wall. This far away, he could pretend that the heat burning in his cheeks was from the exertion, and not because his traitor of a mind kept drifting out of his control and imagining how her mouth might feel against his. “Some help would be appreciated,” he huffed.

“Oh, I was planning on just sitting back and watching,” she replied with a grin, but she began to help him nonetheless. She followed his pattern—one mat on the floor, the other upright atop it until both the wall and a large patch of the floor on that side of the room were cushioned—and said as she adjusted her handiwork, “No wonder the Sith all died out, then. None of them must have had any limbs left.”

_A joke,_ Ben thought in bewildered awe,  _she’s making a joke around you; she tolerates you enough for that._ More than  _tolerates,_ perhaps: for the past week, she’d been eating half of her meals with him, spending the rest with Finn, Poe Dameron, a girl with a contagious laugh and waves of shiny black hair, and a tall bearded man whose bright signature in the Force felt like the electric rush of jumping to lightspeed. The first time she’d sat opposite him, placing her tray down as though she belonged there, he hadn’t been able to believe it. Now, he’d grown accustomed to her presence and the easy rhythm of their conversations, and most dangerously of all, if she were to stop sitting with him, he’d miss her.

“What are these for?” Rey asked, tapping a mat. “They seem a bit like overkill if we’re just going to be sparring, don’t they?”

“They’re a precaution,” he said, “and I was thinking that instead of sparring, we’d do something a little different. Has Luke taught you how to Force push yet?”

“He has, but I still have a way to go before I’m anywhere near decent at it.”

Ben quirked up his lips. “That’s what we’ll do, then.” Gesturing to where he stood, he told her, “Stand here, and I’ll go over to where you are. As I try to walk towards you, you’re going to push me away from you and into the mats.”

With a keen nod—he’d learned anew that it wasn’t in her nature to balk at a challenge, and that when Jakku’s howling sandstorms had caged her inside her AT-AT, she’d put herself through increasingly difficult training sims purely to stave off the boredom—Rey swapped places with him. Slowly, he advanced on her, pacing himself so that she’d have time to act. As she threw out her hand, knitting her brows and pressing her lips pale in concentration, the Force eddied around her in answer to her call, her power coming to her in streams of molten honey-gold like sunset-glow seeping into the ocean. He had maybe a sliver of a second to brace himself for the impact before he was jerked backwards to hit the mats with a  _thump._

Catching himself before he fell to the floor in an ungraceful heap, Ben just about landed on his feet. “That was good,” he said, knocked breathless for a moment, “but now you’re going to do it again, and this time, I want you to be even faster. In a real fight against another Force user, your enemy won’t wait for you to make a move.” It was half a lie, and he was sure that they both knew it. When they’d fought on Starkiller Base, Heorot, and Boreas, most of his strikes had been defensive, and when he’d had chances to cut her down, he’d ignored them, aiming for her blade instead of the weak spots that she’d left unguarded.

The more they practiced, the more the smile that had begun to play on Rey’s lips grew, deepening the dimples that carved themselves into her cheeks. After another few tries, she’d improved to the point where Ben could barely take one step towards her without a gale-wind gust of the Force tilting the ground from under his feet and sending him crashing into the mats against the wall.

“How are you doing that?” she asked, frowning at him as he righted himself. “Stopping yourself from falling flat on your backside, I mean.”

A frisson of courage sparked in Ben’s chest, and before he knew it—before it could gutter out—he’d offered, “Would you like me to show you?”

Rey nodded, her eyes shining with eagerness. “Please.”

Ben inhaled and let the cool air spread from his lungs to his toes, then reached out for the Force, which pooled at the tips of his fingers, as ready as an old friend. Whisper-gentle, he wrapped invisible tendrils around her slim waist, and at the lightest tug, lifted her up as if she were a featherweight. Feeling her soles leave the floor, her mouth shaped a surprised  _oh!,_ and when he’d raised her higher than his head, she looked down at the ground to see her feet dangling, then at him, bestowing a brilliant ear-to-ear beam upon him.

“I’m going to let you down,” he told her, though at the sight of her grin, his heart had turned itself into a strange, fluttery thing that wanted nothing more than to hold on to the memory for as long as it could. “The moment I do, focus as hard as you can on landing on your feet. Imagine yourself doing it, and you will.” Her trepidation skittered across the bond, unsteady like a newborn fawn’s legs, so he softened his voice and said, “Trust me.”

He released her then, and she dropped neatly onto the balls of her feet. “That was  _incredible,”_ she breathed as she stepped off the mat, her cheeks flushed pink with glee. “It really felt like I was flying!” she added, still grinning, and upon hearing that, there was no suppressing his answering smile.

Later, once they’d tidied up after themselves and were winding down with some stretches, Ben paused. A question had been simmering at the back of his mind since their first sparring session with Luke, never straying far from his thoughts and bleeding into his every interaction with her. While she faced away from him—it was less nerve-wracking that way—he asked, “Do I not frighten you?” Rey turned, and seeing the confusion pinching her brow, he swallowed and elaborated, “Fighting with me, training with me, and all the while knowing who I was and what I’ve done. Aren’t you afraid of me?”

She gave him a tiny half-smile. “I haven’t been afraid of you for a long time, Ben,” she said, matter-of-fact.

“Oh,” was the best response that Ben could muster for a few moments. Each time he’d pictured how this conversation might unfold, he’d prepared himself for anything from a stony  _I don’t fear you; I pity you_ to  _yes, you scare me, I’m sorry,_ but he’d never in his wildest dreams imagined a reply like  _I haven’t been afraid of you for a long time_ and a faintly-there enigma of a smile. Gathering what remained of his wits, he forced himself to push aside the gladness blossoming within him. “Since when?”

“Since Ahch-To, about six months ago,” Rey guessed, shrugging. “Luke and I used to talk about you. Back then, I was furious with you, and I saw you as nothing more than a monster, but the way he loved and forgave you despite everything made me realise that… well, you’re just a man, whether you’re calling yourself Kylo Ren or Ben Organa or something else entirely. And,” she went on, her tone halting, as though she were trying to arrange the words as she spoke them, “the more I get to know you, and now that I remember the Praxeum, the more I see that you’re somebody I could have been friends with or even—” All of a sudden, she clamped her mouth shut, her cheeks almost flaming. Weakly, she finished, “Somebody I could have been friends with in another life.”

“In another life?” he questioned softly.

Her lips curled up into a small smile. “Or in this one.”

Ben let himself smile in return, and this time, he allowed the warmth of it to radiate through him until he felt as if he’d never known what it was like to be cold.

 

* * *

 

He’d been granted a week of peace, but he’d been right to keep being wary of what shape his dreams might take when he lay down to sleep. Peace, Ben ought to have learned by now, could never last—at least, not for people like him, who deserved it less than anyone.

That night, pleasantly drowsy from an afternoon spent training, he sank into slumber with only the most minute wisp of fear twined around his heart, ready to pull strangle-tight, and yet, once his head touched the pillow, nightmares wove themselves in between his eyelashes.

Spun from swirling thread as dark as a cell with no windows, they built a familiar stone fortress and set it against a bruise-purple sky. Inside its walls tangled with vines, lightning surged from Snoke’s grave-thin fingertips and crackled along his bones until he thought they might splinter apart. All the while, Rey screamed fit to shred her throat, and she wouldn’t— _couldn’t—_ stop even when the tower crumbled to dust around them and bells chimed and somebody promised her  _we’ll come back for you, sweetheart._ More terrible images swooped by: a planet blanketed in snow and flames and fallen ships, First Order and Resistance alike, and him watching helpless as a burst of midnight-black like a spear sailed straight for Rey’s back. That same wintry stretch of field, where two bodies lay, one with blood blooming from a wound in its middle, and the second clinging to it with frozen hands, crystal tears glittering on her freckled cheeks.

In the real world, an odd  _click-click-click_ blew the nightmares from his head like stray curls of smoke. The sound pried open his eyelids and jerked him up onto his elbows in time for him to whip his bleary gaze towards the door, which slid open to reveal Rey at the threshold, her frame limned in white by the artificial light of the corridors. She was barefoot, wearing a too-large t-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts that fell just above her knees, and looked younger, somehow, without that golden aura of power blazing from her as if from a bright-burning star.

Ben blinked up at her, his chest heaving—but unbloodied—and became uncomfortably aware of the film of cold sweat sticking his sleep-shirt to his skin. For a moment, he’d thought her still part of a dream. A dream of that time  _before,_ when they’d been young: him unscarred with unsullied hands, and her with a smile to rival the sun, dimmed only by the fire and bells that made her voice shrink small enough for him to have to strain to hear her over the snoring of the other boys.

“I saw that,” she whispered into the darkness, her voice as much a haunted little thing as it had been back then, “but I don’t know whether it was mine or yours.”

Usually, he’d come to realise, there was a way to tell whose dreams were whose. The worst of hers would have her calling out— _mother, father, somebody, anybody, please—_ without a response, or being abandoned by faceless figures who shrank further from her reach the more she ran, or lost in endless rolling dunes until her legs gave out underneath her, and his would always parade his guilt before him as if to whet it scalpel-sharp and plunge it into him. But this time, the nightmare was a mixture of  _them_ so perfectly blended that it was impossible to pick out what had belonged to whom.

“It was ours,” Ben whispered back, his words edged with a hoarseness that almost ate them whole.

A determined swallow bobbed in Rey’s throat. Without waiting for him to invite her inside, she twitched her fingers and the door slid shut behind her, then in the silence came the sand-soft sound of her footsteps approaching his bed. The lamp atop his nightstand flickered on and cast her in warm, gentle light, illuminating the wash of goosebumps spanning from her wrists to her upper arms. Perhaps, he dared let himself think, the thought of witnessing his death had disturbed her, even if it had been just a dream—and then he almost huffed a brittle laugh aloud, knowing that her legs were trembling because she’d seen  _herself_ die, not him. Not ever him.

She padded closer, hovering in some no man’s land between bolting out of the door and taking the plunge to sit on his bed, until finally, she lowered herself to perch at the very edge. He scooted up to give her more room, and instead of taking it, she fidgeted, clasping and unclasping her hands.

“I’m going to sleep here tonight,” she said at last, forcing a pale imitation of surety into her voice. “I don’t know anything about how this—” she made a sweeping gesture to encompass them both, “—bond stuff works, but we used to do this when we were young, didn’t we? And I thought—I thought maybe it’ll help.” Uncertainty dwindled her words to nothing, as though she were trying in vain to convince herself that there was a solution. Like she didn’t want to have to accept that her head would swim with silver blossoms and roof-high flames until she had faces to call  _mother_ and  _father,_ and maybe even then it wouldn’t stop.

Before he could climb out of bed and offer to spend the night on the floor—something in him suspected that even the carpet on Alinor would be more comfortable than where he’d stolen sparse hours of fitful sleep aboard the  _Finalizer—_ Rey lifted the duvet and shuffled underneath. His blood drummed hard in his veins and his lungs froze on an inbreath, holding it there as if releasing it would startle her away like a wild bird. Foggily, he wondered if she’d still be as cold as she’d been at the Praxeum, when she’d curl up beside him and press a pair of tiny, icy feet into the backs of his legs so that he’d jolt and grumble at her, but as she lay down and willed the lamp to switch itself off, her heat positively glowed against him.

_Oh,_ Ben thought, his mind spiralling into dizziness at how  _close_ she was,  _she’s so warm._ Somehow, he couldn’t imagine her any other way.

Closing his eyes, he inched towards the wall, hoping with the last few shreds of hope left in him that his yearning wouldn’t flow across the bond for her to see. More than anything, he ached to turn to her, wrap an arm around her, and tuck her against his chest, where he could run his fingers through her silken-smooth hair until they both drifted off. For a man of such little talent with words, it would say  _you’ll never be lost or alone again, I promise_ better than he could aloud—but he’d never risk trying, and of course, she’d never allow it.

“By the way,” Rey mumbled, her words sleep-slurred, “I’m doing this for me.” There was no bite in it—instead, her tone carried a note of good-natured humour so at odds with what they’d just seen that he guessed that Jakku had made her an expert in stashing away bad memories to keep herself going.

“I know,” Ben replied, fighting off a tired—but true—smile.

He felt, rather than saw, the answering smile that pulled up her lips. Then, he sensed it the moment that she dipped out like a light, drenched in sweet dreams, and in all his life, he’d never felt safer.

 

* * *

 

Dreams as colourful and as finely spun as nebulae rose up to lead Rey from where she lay in Ben’s bed to some beautiful world halfway between night and day—the dawn, she supposed, or maybe the dusk. It was impossible to tell: both the sun and the full, fat moon hung at equal points in the lilac sky, neither one rising nor setting, and each gave out a dim, hazy glow that illuminated all around her in shades of silver and gold.

_Every day and every night, when all is lilac, gold, and silver,_ her storyteller’s lovely voice began, flowing from a memory like music,  _when the sun and the moon are both spreading their fingertips across the land, the wolf cubs meet, and there, they’re happy to play until the end of time._

In the curious manner of a dream, she knew that she’d find him there before she turned to look. Ben stood beside her in the plum-dark grass, silvery-white casting off the angles of his cheekbones as though he’d been forged from a slice of crescent moon. She lifted up her arm to discover that the veins branching up from her wrist to her inner elbow were gold, and her skin was more radiant, as if she were lit up from within by neuron-strings of tiny candles. Most awe-inspiring of all, around Ben’s head was a delicate crown of thousands of stars, like her night-wolf with his constellation-spangled coat.

When she faced him, he gazed at her like she was the sun made human, and in this dream-world, perhaps she was. Tentative, as though compelled to, Rey raised her hand to cup his moon-bathed jaw, but before she could reach him, he closed his fingers around her wrist. She didn’t consider herself small by any means, but he dwarfed her effortlessly, which  _shouldn’t_ have sent her heart fluttering fit to take flight the way it did. If she’d tried to touch him like that in reality, he might have shrunk away, or seized her and shoved her aside. Here, he was so gentle that her breath left her: keeping his eyes on hers, he lifted her sand-roughened palm to his mouth and—she let out a little  _oh—_ pressed a whisper of a kiss to her callused heartline, letting his lips linger there.

Slowly, she fanned out her fingers to brush the ever-so-slight dip in his skin that his scar— _her_ scar—had carved. In the waking world, it formed a line of faded pink, but now, at the merest graze of a fingertip, she’d gilded it like the pots and vases that she’d seen only on the wealthiest stalls at Niima Outpost, where a crack in the ceramic would be mended with a gleaming artery of gold. He released her, revealing a golden handprint on his cheek, but he neither felt it nor cared: he drank her in with the greed of a man who’d gone weeks without seeing sunlight, his eyes widening at the sight of her wrist.

As she followed his gaze down, Rey gasped. He’d stained her silver like stardust in a perfect band where he’d held her, and as though a sudden spark had ignited in her lower belly, she wanted nothing more than to have him daub the rest of her in that silver.

Whether they were the sun and the moon themselves hardly seemed to matter as, with new confidence, she combed through the soft, inky curls that hid his ears, her fingers leaving a glimmering trail in their wake. Tangling the fingers of one hand in his hair tight enough to say  _I want_ or  _please,_ she pulled him down to her, and then—and then she was kissing him, and he was cupping her cheeks as though afraid to break her, and they were sinking to their knees in the grass, and the dream could have shattered apart around them and she wouldn’t have noticed.

Rey stroked through Ben’s waves of sun-dusted hair and his big palms skimmed along the slight curves of her moon-drenched sides, bringing to life hundreds upon hundreds of nerve endings that she hadn’t known existed until now. The sheer intensity of his touch made her realise at last that they were both naked, each of their countless scars streaking like starlines across their bare skin, but she couldn’t find it in herself to be embarrassed of her nudity. Jakku hadn’t taught her modesty, not when getting to strip down to her makeshift underclothes and take a proper shower—even if it had been for a minute at most with near-freezing water from a rusted-over spout—had been rare and beyond precious.

Ben’s fingertips grazed over the small swells of her breasts until heat pooled between her thighs and made her body burn with hunger for more, far more than just his lips on hers, and so she shifted away, then kissed a bright path down from his jaw to his clavicle. Under her lips, his heartbeat thrummed like a bird’s wings. He let out a tremulous gasp as she kissed him there, his bitten-short nails digging rows of half-moons into her back.  _Mine,_ whispered a strange, fierce voice that seemed to come from somewhere nestled behind her ribs.

She wanted to press her hands and lips and teeth and tongue to every inch of him and paint him in her gold until he could put the sun to shame.

No, she wanted more than that. She wanted to hold him close, so close that the line between each of them blurred and she couldn’t tell where the night ended and the day began, and together, they’d be the dawn.

_“Cyar’ika,”_ Ben murmured raggedly, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear as she moved away to see that her kisses had strung together a constellation from his plush mouth to where his pulse trembled in his collar.

The endearment had every gulp of air rushing out of her lungs at once, and for a moment, all she could do was search his eyes, finding nothing but tenderness there.  _Beloved,_ it meant, in the old  _Mando’a_ tongue, or  _darling,_ though she’d only ever read of it and had never imagined hearing it spoken aloud. Rey opened her mouth—to ask what, she didn’t know—but before she could summon the words to speak, Ben leaned forwards and captured her lips with his.

Guiding her down, he laid her on her back in the grass, and with cautious and quivering hands, his thumbs rubbed gentle, reverent circles on the points of her hipbones. She parted her bronzed legs for him, watching him smile in quiet wonder as he knelt between them and took her in, small breasts and meagre curves and scars and strong lines of muscle and all. A startled little exhale huffed from her unbidden as Ben bent and kissed the valley between her breasts, and she arched beneath him and buried her fingers in his hair as he kept kissing her, making his way down to her belly. Panting, Rey propped herself up on her elbows and peered down: he’d marked each rib with silver.

He lingered at her hips, giving each sharp jut a butterfly-light kiss, then brushed his mouth over the too-sensitive skin of her inner thigh and journeyed down to the insides of her knees, not up as she craved so desperately. Her breaths stemmed from her lips as steam, the fingers of her free hand clenching so hard in the grass that a few blades tore themselves apart in her grip. Returning to the apex of her thighs, Ben glanced up at her with questioning, heavy-lidded eyes, and she whispered “Yes”, and she—

—woke up.

A few lilac-tinged seconds of peace had her brimming with the same bliss that she’d felt in the dream, when Ben had kissed her silver from her lips to her thighs. When he’d looked at her with such adoration in his eyes and called her  _cyar’ika,_ as if she were truly his beloved. As if she were  _anyone’s_ beloved. The lazy trickle of awareness swelled into a surge like cold seawater as she realised that the furnace-warmth suffusing into her belonged to another body, and that—her heart stammered—Ben lay beside her.

Rey hissed one of the more powerful curses that Jakku had to offer and spun to face him, careful not to rustle the sheets enough to disturb him. To her utter relief, he was still sound asleep, but he’d turned her way at some point in the night, curled in on himself with an open hand beside his head, as though waiting for her to interlace her fingers with his. In the faint smoky-grey light that seeped through the gap in the curtains, she could see the softness written over his features, from the dark hair haloed out on the pillow to the feathery black lashes swooping and grazing cheeks that were far less hollow than they’d been when she and Luke had brought him home. She ached with desire—with the urge to touch him; to reach out and hold his hand just to see what would happen when he awoke—and yet, she shouldn’t want him, this monster who’d killed his own father.

This boy who’d never stood a chance, ensnared since before he’d even been born. This man who’d been willing to forfeit his life for her and Luke and thousands of strangers on Alinor, and who’d risked everything to save his mother.

She certainly shouldn’t want to kiss him senseless until he gasped like he had in the dream, or to feel his lips on her breasts, or even between her legs. Rey was naïve, but not so naïve that she didn’t know what those things meant. Before she’d left for Ahch-To, a smiling-voiced medic had made sure that she was up-to-date with her vaccinations and given her more tests than she could count—her height, weight, blood type, eyesight, hearing, bone density, dental health,  _everything—_ and then recommended a five-year contraceptive device, just in case. She’d agreed to it, though she’d never pictured herself in a position where she’d need it. Now, she rubbed the pad of a finger over the tiny bump in her upper arm and swallowed, her throat as dry as the dunes.

It had been next to impossible to walk around Niima Outpost without hearing about sex—or  _fucking,_ as they’d called it there. A thing as commonplace on Alinor as trust had been scarce, but judging by how it had sounded, few on Jakku needed to trust a person to  _fuck_ them, not when it could take months of wary side-by-side sifting through wrecks and cautious, hopeful exchanges of water and then morsels of food before two scavengers became a couple. Not when all that most talked about was how selfish their bed partners were, or the acts that they’d done to another as if that person had been nothing but a warm body to use.

But her—their—dream had been different, like they’d been lovers. Like they hadn’t been about to  _fuck,_ but to  _make love_ to each other, which she’d thought a myth until, after one too many bottles of spicebrew, a tipsy Jess had rambled to her about a partner she’d once had before the war, then gone suddenly, achingly quiet. Like if she’d stayed asleep, Ben would have gently taken her apart with his lips and tongue, then held her close as he slid himself inside her, murmuring yet more hushed, beautiful words into her ears.

There were dozens of important fate-of-the-galaxy things that she ought to be thinking about, but whether Ben Organa would be a lover as soft as moonlight or as passionate as sun-fire—or some blend in between—was  _not_ one of them, and nor was wondering just how many people he’d taken to his bed. Her cheeks were far too hot; her whole body was ablaze, and if she remained there until dawn broke, she thought, half-delirious, she’d set the bedclothes on fire.

If she remained there until dawn broke, she’d have to face Ben once sleep surrendered its hold on him. She’d have to watch as he drifted awake beside her, then drew back without thinking, remembering the sight of her golden and bare before him. Or worse: he might narrow his eyes and question her about it as if she alone had made it happen, and she wouldn’t be able to bear that.

Scowling to herself, her heart thrashing against her breastbone like a feral thing, Rey slipped out of his bed, hurried to smooth down the rumples in the sheets, and adjusted his duvet, making it look like she’d never been there at all.

Without risking a glance back, she used the Force to unlock the door and stole away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally outlined the bare bones of this chapter way before _The Last Jedi_ was released, so imagine my glee when we _actually_ got a "you're not alone" scene in canon! As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
> 
> Finn briefly mentions the [Anzati](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Anzat_\(species\)), a near-human, Force-sensitive species who feed on brains. They're often considered to be the stuff of folk tales.
> 
> _[Kintsugi,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi)_ or _kintsukuroi,_ is the Japanese art of repairing pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered silver, gold, or platinum, which Rey has seen around Niima Outpost every now and then. Through _kintsugi,_ the breaks in an object are treated as a part of its history, and it becomes more beautiful for its scars—so no wonder Rey thinks of it when she sees what she's done to Ben in the dream.
> 
> In _Mando'a_ , to call somebody ["cyar'ika"](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mando%27a/Legends) is to call them "darling", "beloved", or "sweetheart".


	10. Born by the Ocean

On Jakku, the sand-scrubbing old women with craggy faces and palms cracked like dried-out earth had said that survival ran in a scavenger’s blood. They’d said that it was embroidered into them with countless scars and calluses; that it sharpened each and every one of their senses to knife-points. It beat in their veins, ticking along to a rhythm that, if anybody were to press their ear up close, would hammer out nothing but an unrelenting _keep-going-keep-going-keep-going_ against their ribcage until it couldn’t any longer.

Yet when Rey’s survival instincts niggled at the inside of her skull and demanded that she avoid Ben, confused by what she’d dreamed of and how incredibly _good_ it had felt—even if it hadn’t been real; even if it _couldn’t_ ever be real—to have his lips on hers, she set her jaw and refused to listen.

Later that morning, ill-rested from tossing and turning until sunrise and with nerves sparking haywire, she caught his eye for a split-second as he forced down his meagre breakfast of caf and a single piece of unbuttered toast. Though she felt her cheeks flushing scarlet to match his, he looked away first, darting his gaze towards the doors and focusing instead on taking a too-long gulp from his cup.

When it was time to meet Luke in the forest clearing, she waited for Ben outside the cafeteria, but neither of them could find it in themselves to speak, and as they walked, the air between them trembled with anxious tension thick enough to slice through. When Luke called them up one by one to spar with him, she couldn’t stop herself from guessing what move Ben would make a half-heartbeat before he lunged or dodged or parried exactly as she’d imagined, as if they were one soul scythed apart and locked into two separate bodies. And when Luke shot them a curious, _knowing_ glance, then brushed off his robes and bade them goodbye, leaving the two of them alone in the cream-yellow early autumn sun, she heard Ben’s fortifying intake of breath as though it were her own.

“About last night’s dream,” he began, swiping a hand through his wild tangle of hair. His mouth worked as he struggled to dredge up the right words and assemble them into speech, but her mind had already conjured up a dozen different scenes of him confronting her, curling his lip, and asking _why were you thinking of me like that,_ or gritting his teeth and telling her _that shouldn’t have happened._ She didn’t know why—or perhaps she did, but couldn’t bear the thought of admitting it to herself—but it would hurt her like a physical pain deep in her chest to hear him say those things again—only real, inescapably real.

Rey clenched her fists, digging a skyful of moon-prints into her palms with her fresh-bitten nails. What in R’iia’s name was _wrong_ with her? In all her twenty years, she’d never known her heart to be so fragile around another person. She’d always guarded it as fiercely as she would hard-won salvage, but now, it felt like it might shatter at his slightest word.

“Don’t,” she rushed to get out, needing to soften the inevitable blow before it could land. “You don’t need to try to—to explain it. It was just the Force, right?” Her traitor of a voice wavered, tapering off into a feeble little, “It didn’t mean anything.”

It was as if a door had slammed shut behind Ben’s sunlit brandy-and-bronze eyes. “Right,” he said quietly, like she’d snuffed out a match-flame inside him. His dark eyebrows pinched together and a flash of an emotion too quick for her to catch flitted across the bond, almost as though he’d been hoping that she’d say something else—as though, as impossible as it sounded, he’d _wanted_ it to have meant something to her. “It didn’t mean anything,” he repeated, his voice a fraction stiffer, then turned his back, slumping his shoulders by a hairsbreadth.

A lump rose in Rey’s throat, forcing her to swallow. For the first time since they’d met again in this new second-chance life, it felt as if the easy companionship between them was a thread, slipping through her fingers. “Do you—do you want to teach me?” she hedged, fighting to grasp hold of it. “Like you did yesterday?”

Ben faced her, the corners of his mouth quirking up into a near-smile. “Actually,” he replied after a moment of consideration, “I was thinking that I’d quite like it if _you_ taught me something today.”

She frowned up at him, some uncertain part of her sure that he was joking. “What could I possibly have to teach you?” she asked. “Aren’t you the one who’s been training for years?”

That half-smile didn’t leave Ben’s lips, and the more Rey examined it, the less teasing it seemed; rather, it was tinged with sweetness and the sadness that he carried with him everywhere he went, reminding her of how he’d told her _you weren’t even trying, but somehow, you still inspired me to want to be better,_ and of how that simple confession borne of his sudden urge to voice it had sent the last of the walls that she’d built around herself crumbling. In just a few words, he’d made her feel truly _seen:_ she inspired him not because she was Rey, almost-Jedi with a galaxy-weight to shoulder, but because she was nobody else but herself, a girl with perseverance engraved onto each of her bones.

“There’s a lot that you could teach me, Rey,” he told her, his tone so earnest that she couldn’t help but believe him.

He was right—she’d never forget Jakku’s many lessons, not even if she made it to be silver-haired and wrinkled with age—but, try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything that would be useful to him.

If they’d been in the desert, she could have shown him how to drain the sugar-sticky sap from the fleshy green innards of a spinebarrel, or how to ration a quarter-full canteen of water from sundown all the way to sunup, but he’d have no need of such things on lush Alinor, a world veined with glass-clear lakes and with rivers winding over its surface like arteries. She could have piled her arms high with sticks and scrap and had him learn how to fashion a crude snare, then how to kill the hapless bloggin that would wander inside and how to pluck out its stubby feathers, but a man like him could break a creature’s neck with the merest snap of his fingers, if he willed it. Were they shin-deep in sand and miles from home, she could have waited until nightfall to point up at the blanket of stars above and taught him to let them guide him across the vast sea of dunes, but what good would that do him here, the furthest from being lost he’d been in fifteen years?

“I could teach you to fight,” she offered weakly, restraining herself from adding a wry _in case it turns out that all we need to do to defeat Snoke is kick him in the ribs._ Casting her gaze about as though asking the woods for an answer, Rey searched for _something,_ until a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye drew her attention: a tiny, plump wren flew out of a sprawling candleberry bush, its prickly leaves bobbing and swaying in the bird’s wake. “Oh,” she blurted out, “do you remember when you projected yourself into my quarters?” At Ben’s nod, she went on, “You saw my plants, didn’t you? I can make them do things; grow however I choose. If I want to, I can even keep them from dying. It’s an ability called Consitor Sato, I think—maybe I could show you?”

At first, she hadn’t realised what she was doing, or even that it could be done at all. Back on Jakku, she could have trudged through the dunes for klicks upon klicks before she stumbled upon the faint, weary skittermouse-heart thrum of a spinebarrel or a nightbloomer refusing to wither and die. Here, everything—the dirt packed beneath her feet; the bushes bowing under the weight of berries coloured like blood or wine or the plum-violet moments before the sun slipped below the horizon, all as fat as grapes; the trees with their cradles of branches that towered above her and sliced the light into honeyed streams—hummed with the desire to be alive.

Each plant had pure life pulsing from its roots to its stem, and when the picked flowers on her windowsill had called out to her, she’d answered them, telling them _live, then, if you want to live._ They’d replied by doing the impossible: they kept their petals; they budded _more,_ somehow, her centaureas sprouting new pink and purple flowers; and her gorsa cutting fluoresced all day and all night, like it had never occurred to it to stop.

Like her in the desert, dry-lunged and sore-fingered, her plants had wanted nothing more than to just keep going.

Confidence flaring within her, warm and bright, Rey gave Ben a look that said _watch me_ without the need for words. She directed her focus towards the wildflower-speckled grass brushing against his boots and beckoned it up-up-up, ribbons of her shimmering gold twining around the small green shoots. Little clovers and daisies shivered as the Force grazed against them, then climbed past his ankles. In a matter of seconds, they’d woven their way up to his knees, and it was there that she told them to stay. He startled, but then peered down, and all of the trepidation in his expression melted away to a soft, pure kind of awe at the sight of what she’d done, his lips curving into a subtle—but _there—_ smile. Gently, so as not to harm the blooms, he stooped and stroked the head of a daisy with the very tip of a finger, as if to prove to himself that it was real.

Rey bade the flowers wrapping around his legs to shrink back down to normal, then met his wide eyes and told him, “All right, now you try.”

“How?”

“The same as you would anything else,” she said with a shrug. It was all that she could give him: every explanation that came to her dissolved like spun sugar on her tongue, far too feeble for her to voice and too complex to unravel—to her, the act felt as instinctive as drawing breath. “You ask it to do what you want it to do, and it’ll listen.” Rey pointed to a patch of centaureas in a myriad of blues and pinks and purples, where a thumbnail-sized bud was nestled tightly shut like a bird with its beak tucked under its wing. “Maybe start with this one over here?” she suggested. “Just ask it to open up for you.”

Ben pressed his lips together as though on the verge of shaking his head and backing away, then narrowed his eyes in determination and strode across the clearing to where the flower sprigs stood tall amidst the grass. He knelt and lifted a hand to hover it over the bud, and the Force responded in an instant: in the world that lay just beyond theirs, wisps of silver spiralled from his palm to each folded-up petal, coaxing them to unfurl until they sprang full, blossoming into a shade of indigo so deep and dark that Rey could only describe it as _midnight._

For what felt like an age, Ben said nothing, and all that Rey could hear was a lone bird’s warbling song and the sound of the leaves murmuring amongst themselves, intensified twofold in his silence. “I’m not used to this,” he admitted at last, so quiet that the whispering of the woods almost drowned him out. “Using the Force to make things grow—” Experimentally, he splayed his hand over the grass, and a few blades surged up in the gaps between his fingers, “—rather than to destroy them. To protect and to heal, rather than to kill.” An unconscious clench of his fist ripped the blades from the ground, and in a thick voice, he continued, “It’s the exact opposite of what I’ve been trained to do since I was a boy. The exact opposite of what I was told I was born to become.”

“We still kill,” Rey demurred, and before she knew it, her feet had carried her to kneel beside him.

_(After the Resistance had returned from a battle on grey, storm-swept Heorot, where she’d been left with no choice but to strike down a group of a half-dozen stormtroopers, memories of the acrid smell of burnt plastoid armour and their bodies strewn like broken dolls over the jagged outcroppings of rock and stone had all but consumed her. She’d blink and, as quick as whiplash, imagine what she’d find if she were to pry off their helmets: Finn’s laughing mouth gone slack, his kind eyes sapped of life, or the empty face of a person too young to know what sound a blaster made when it was fired, let alone hold one. With skin still blotchy and pink from a shower dialled hot enough to scald, she’d sought out Luke in the forest and confided in him about how she’d become a killer._

_Luke looked at her with blue eyes as deep as oceans, and in that moment, became what he truly was inside: a haunted man with a gaze that was both wistful and endless. “This war makes killers out of us all,” he told her, all of a sudden seeming far older than his fifty-five years, even in the way he held himself—as if kept upright by a length of fraying string, which his night-time ghosts with their river-gowns and sand-scratched cheeks would have to sew together again. “I don’t know how many people are dead because of me, Rey, whether they died fighting me or for me.”_

_Rey gulped down a sob, and even after she was certain that she’d quelled it, could only muster a rough-voiced, “How do you cope with it?”_

_He gave her a half-smile so flimsy that it guttered out not a second later. “When I can, I remember them. And when I can’t, when there’s too many…” His shoulders rose and then sank in a heavy shrug, as though all the air had been taken out of him, and he said nothing more, just let her sit with him until her chest stopped aching.)_

“But you don’t _want_ to,” Ben replied, “and that’s the point.” He lapsed into silence once more, examining his smooth, long-fingered hands, now smudged with green; Rey knew, as if by instinct, that he was picturing a different kind of stain there. She could almost hear the clamour of words gathering on the tip of his tongue, waiting to be shaped into sentences, until he finally asked, “Will you walk with me?”

The tenuous hope laid bare in his eyes took her by surprise and robbed her of the ability to form words of her own. Despite their dream and how he might have woken up feeling disturbed—or violated, even, though she prayed with every last piece of her that he hadn’t—he wanted to spend _more_ time with her; to venture further into the forest, just the two of them. After a moment, before he could interpret her speechlessness as a _no,_ Rey found her voice and managed to answer, “All right.”

She almost leapt to stand up, trying and failing to hide her eagerness. Ben joined her and fell into perfect step with her as they brushed through the undergrowth, ducking under weeping branches and, as best as they could, ignoring the snag of low-lying brambles against the hems of their trousers. There was no need to have a real destination in mind, and nor did she feel like she had to speak: the more they walked, the louder the woods became, as though it had a heartbeat of its own—one far quieter than hers and faster than Ben’s, made up of birdsong and sighing wind and the distant roar of a waterfall.

A while passed before the maze of trees gave way, and Rey realised that without meaning to, she’d led him—or allowed herself to be led—to one of _her_ spots: the lake, so crystal-clear that it was as if the sky had fallen in, fluffy lambswool clouds and all. She reached its shore and dropped down there, where she wasted no time in undoing the laces of her boots, dipping her feet into the water, and letting out a little hum of pleasure as it lapped cool at her ankles. Mirroring her, Ben arranged his long legs into a sitting position, then looked out, spellbound, at the light glittering golden on the lake’s surface, his lips parted like he wanted to drink everything in. He plucked a rounded pebble from the shallows and tossed it, watching as it bounced once, twice, three times, landing with a _splash_ and making the sunlit waters ripple like fresh-spilled honey.

While he was turned away, Rey studied his profile in detail, picking up on the slight furrow of his brows and the faraway sheen in his eyes. “What are you thinking about?”

Ben aimed a glance her way. “How do you know that I’m thinking of anything?”

 _Because I know you by now,_ she wanted to tell him. _I know how you look when you’re holding yourself together by a thread, how your eyes light up when you’re somewhere close to happiness, and how every emotion shows on your face, no matter how hard you try to mask it._ “Because I can feel it,” she replied instead, chancing a smile. “You feel like a rushing river in the bond, all choppy.”

“I’m thinking,” he began, then frowned, unsure of where to go with the words that he’d just set free. He peered over the lakeshore, Rey following suit: echoed in the water, against a too-blue sky, was a young woman whose tangled hair skimmed her collarbones and a man who’d chewed his full lips until they bloomed pink. “I’m thinking about who I am,” he said, more to their reflections than to her. “Last week, when I healed you, I felt as though it wasn’t me doing it, and it wasn’t. Not the ‘me’ I’ve known. I hear whispers about how I’ve come back to being Ben Organa, but I don’t believe that I have. There was never a real Ben Organa for me to be; there was just a boy with Snoke in his head from the very day that he was born, shrouding everything he ever did.” Pausing for breath, he dragged in a deep, shuddering inhale, as if trying to fill the whole of him. “I look at what I’ve done with you and Luke—the healing, the plants, even feeding those birds—and think, ‘would Ben Organa have been like this?’ If Snoke hadn’t…” He cut himself off and forced down a swallow. “If I hadn’t…”

Absently, Rey made a daisy coil around her fingers. “You’re _making_ him real, just by being yourself now,” she insisted, meeting his reflection’s eyes. “But—do you think he would have been like that?”

“Maybe,” Ben said, and his almost-smile was a tiny flicker in the lakewater. “In a way, when I did those things, it felt… right. I—I can’t describe it, but maybe I could show you?” he asked, his tone rising with hope. Rey nodded once, and he pushed an array of old feelings towards her, all of them so powerful that they might have knocked her to the ground had she not been sitting down. Every inch of her body burned with an unbearable sense of wrongness—like trying to fit inside another person’s skin—then _sang,_ as if to say _yes, this is who I’m meant to be._ “Like that,” he told her, softer. “Like I’d been lost, then suddenly found.” He sank back, and a wry twitch tugged at his mouth. “Then again, Ben Organa might have been an utter bastard.”

Rey couldn’t help the smirk that teased up her lips, but it fizzled out and died as she thought of all the could-have-beens.

In another life, they’d have grown up side by side, not half a galaxy apart. Luke had once told her that some of his students had called her Ben’s _duckling,_ and that was how it would have been between them: wherever one went, the other would never be far behind. She’d have become his padawan, if he’d asked, and they’d have travelled everywhere and seen everything together. Maybe—here she guarded her thoughts, holding them as close as she could—just maybe, in that world-that-never-was, they were lovers, as they’d been in their dream of the dawn between, but she wouldn’t need him to wear a crown of stars and he wouldn’t need her to be the sun made human. They’d be Ben and Rey, and that would be enough.

There—her mind started to spin fantasies so rich that they made her dizzy—Leia might have come to think of her as a daughter. She’d have taught her how to twist her hair into braids elaborate or simple, Alderaanian or Nabooian; how to soften or sharpen her features with makeup; how to stand in defiance, chin high and shoulders back; and how to hone each word until it became a weapon in itself.

And Han—Han, though gruff at first, would have seen himself in the scrappy maybe-orphan that his son shyly introduced as his sweetheart. Her eyes would have widened at the sight of the _Falcon,_ and he’d have laughed and beckoned her aboard to point out what he’d modified, from the repaired hyperdrive to the navigation system that seemed, bizarrely, to talk back. Seeing how eager she’d be to absorb _everything_ and to dare suggest her own changes, he might have handed her a set of tools and watched her work, and perhaps even told her that if she ever wanted it, there was a position as the ship’s second mate waiting for her.

A tickle against her inner elbow drew her from her daydreams, and she looked down to find that she’d been so distracted, she’d let the daisy climb around her arm and all the way up to her sleeve. Before her very eyes, its head with its pink-tipped petals drooped and went dull and grey, as though it _felt_ for her. _Don’t worry, I’m all right,_ she reassured it without words, running a fingertip over a delicate leaf, and then told it to _shrink._ Satisfied—if a plant could be satisfied—it dwindled down to its usual height, its colours spreading back into it like paint bleeding into water.

“You know, it’s fitting,” Ben said out of nowhere. His gaze was locked on the daisy, his dark eyes star-touched with unabashed wonder, and as she lifted an eyebrow in confusion, he clarified, “That somebody like you can do such things.” He smiled for her then, bright and genuine. “You’ve been lost and afraid and hurt, but you’ve never once stopped growing. I’ve never seen you give up, not even on me,” he added, his tone gentle and so sincere. Maybe he hadn’t realised—it was the only explanation that she could think of—but his hand had edged closer to hers. If she stretched out her fingers, or even moved them by the barest of inches, they’d be grazing his. “I think I want to be like that. I want to meet who Ben Organa is supposed to be.”

Rey’s smile grew to match his. “I’ve already met him.”

“Have you?” He glanced over at her, a half-smile tugging at his mouth. “What’s he like?”

“Tall,” she said at once. The word almost flung itself from her tongue, and she might have regretted her answer had he not let out an undignified little snort, giving her the courage to carry on. “Probably part tree, if I’m being honest. But—” She made herself ignore the blaze that had ignited in her cheeks and looked into the real-but-not-real world that lay just beyond their waking eyes, where gold and silver threads formed from will-o’-the-wisps danced in the hairsbreadth between their hands, “—the strange thing is: I don’t think I mind sharing a Force bond with him so much.”

Her confession sent her heart pitter-pattering like a wild creature’s swift footsteps, and when Ben did not immediately respond, it began to pound harder against the walls of her chest, as if she were a cage that it sought to escape. “I don’t think I mind sharing one with Aurelia, either,” he said at last, so soft that for a moment, she couldn’t be sure if she’d imagined it or not. “If—if that’s who you are,” he went on, hesitant. “Rey or Aurelia, no matter where you’re from, who you were born to be, or who you choose to be.”

The words _no matter where you’re from_ jarred in her mind, making her thoughts whirl. It _had_ to be the ocean, she decided, averting her eyes from his and gazing out instead at the lake, where shoals of silver-scaled fish no bigger than bumblebees darted through the water, creating ripples for the sun to limn in gold. Why else would she dream of it—the plaintive roar of the tides in her nightmares where fire consumed everything in sight, or the tang of salt and the whisper of the waves in her dream of storytellers and wolves that climbed up to live amongst the clouds and stars? Why would the scent of brine clinging to Luke’s cloak on Ahch-To feel so much like home, if hers hadn’t been by the sea?

“And the same goes for you too, Ben,” Rey said after she’d pulled herself away from her ocean, flashing him a small smile. He needed to hear it—and if reminding him over and over again was what it took until it engraved itself in him like survival did for scavengers, she would do it. “No matter who you are or who you choose to be.”

 

* * *

 

What Ben knew was this: he’d fallen asleep with Rey curled up like a loth-cat beside him, and he’d slackened his strung-tight shoulders enough to let the gentle rhythm of her breathing lull him into dreams where everything had been the colour of the sky before daybreak, except for swathes of grass as dark as a day-old bruise—and _her._ His dream-Rey had stood naked and unashamed before him, her skin golden, as though she’d cupped her hands together for the autumn sunlight to trickle into them and up the arteries in her wrists until it reached the very core of her. She’d _kissed_ him, gilding him with her lips, and then he’d called her _cyar’ika—_ his beloved—and daubed his own kiss-marks of silver all over her, and no sooner had she parted her strong, lean legs for him than the dream faded away, just like that, and the blissful warmth suffusing through him had gone cold.

Pale dawn light had poured through the gap in the curtains to shine in his eyes, and he’d awoken, squinting, to a smoothed-down space next to him—she’d left his bedsheets so neat that she might as well have never lain there at all—and a creeping sense of shame for daring to think of her that way. Not just for dreaming of her like that, bare and beautiful and keen to touch him and be touched in return, but for _wanting_ her. For being twenty-nine and having only ever wanted one person, and for having that one person be as unattainable as catching a shooting star.

He’d expected her to be spitting sparks with anger come the morning—incandescent with it, even; so fury-hot that she’d scald him with a slap the instant he met her eyes in the cafeteria—and so he’d been thrown way off-kilter by her asking if he’d train with her again.

All morning and all afternoon, her simple, nervous request had weighed on him, and he’d spent his time doggedly trying to figure out what she might have meant by it, turning it over like a stone in his mind until he’d learned the sound of each syllable by rote. When the corridors had thundered with the footsteps of hundreds of people heading for their evening meal, he hadn’t opened his door and crept into the crowd to join them. Instead, like a man submerged in a trance, he’d found his way to the forest, and then he’d trekked through the heart of the woods until the lake stretched itself out before him, beckoning him closer with every lap at the shore.

Somehow, even though the lake was Rey’s place and not his—and though a nagging part of him shoved down somewhere deep and dim felt like he was an intruder, trespassing in her private world—he’d been drawn there. He’d propped himself up against the trunk of a willow tree wide enough for three of him to fit inside, and he’d wondered how it was possible that millions were starving, dying, and being forced from their homes, and yet light-years away on a small green-swirled planet, the woods still sighed in the wind and sang with the melodies of countless birds’ trilling calls.

Behind him, the whispery swishing of feet through the tall grass drifted him out of his reverie, and gold—warm, candle-bright sunrise-gold—flooded into him. “Knew you’d be out here,” Rey said as she approached, her words thin, as if she’d raced through the fields and thickets to get to him. “You didn’t show up for the evening meal, so I—I thought I’d come and find you.”

“You looked for me?” Ben asked dumbly, far too stunned to say anything else.

Rey shot him an odd glance and shrugged, but even he could tell that her nonchalance was feigned. “Of course I did,” she replied, and didn’t give him any more than that, offering no answer as to why she’d been so determined to find him, or what had possessed her to hurry there. “Have you eaten at all since breakfast?”

The concern in her voice jerked his awareness to the hunger gnawing at his insides, and a twinge of regret twisted within him. Up until now, though he’d known that it would be unwise to skip his meals if he wanted any hope of being up to par in his lessons with Luke, he hadn’t truly felt it, as though his mind had chosen to focus above all else on the dream that had driven Rey to flee his bed. It wouldn’t have surprised him overmuch if she was able to feel the ache like it was her own, biting at her belly from across the bond, but nonetheless, he nodded and lied, “I had something small a few hours ago.”

“Your mother was right,” Rey told him with a funny half-wistful, half-amused quirk of her lip. “You really _are_ a terrible liar, Ben Organa.” She slid down to sit beside him against the tree’s gnarled old trunk, dug around in her satchel, and at last pulled out two fresh sandwiches wrapped in layers of clear film. Hesitating for a moment, she tore both free of the film, then handed one—his boyhood favourite, though she couldn’t have known: fine-sliced cheese and smoked nerf meat on fluffy white bread—over to him with a soft and almost shy, “Here.”

She didn’t sink her teeth into hers straight away, which was unlike her: in fact, she only let herself eat once he accepted his sandwich and raised it to his lips to take a grateful bite, and as soon as he did, he couldn’t help but notice how she relaxed by an ever-so-slight amount. Ben chewed, all the while stealing glances at her making short work of her food, which bore the singeing scent of spices vaguely familiar to him, like he’d known them in another, happier life, where he might have beamed to see his uncle’s X-wing touching down in the meadows one week and drunk honeyblossom nectar until he was sick the next. They were Luke’s recipe from Tatooine, he supposed, or maybe Dameron’s from Yavin IV, because of course a girl who’d delved through wrecks to earn meagre portions of veg-meat would be desperate to try _every_ new flavour, from those that set her tongue aflame to those so sour that her eyes streamed.

In the bond, the wild whitewater-rush of her Force signature had smoothed to the calm of a windless sea, and the sudden change made him burn with curiosity.

What if, back on Jakku, the act of sharing food had _meant_ something?

The thought had barely shivered into being before he shook his head to dispel it, realising with a strange pang that he was allowing his imagination to run away with him. He’d be a fool to think of her as having any ulterior motives: after years of near-starvation, she was probably loath to see anybody going hungry, even if they just had to _ask_ for food and they’d receive it. But he couldn’t help but wonder—stupidly, he was sure—if by seeking him out and giving him a sandwich taken from the cafeteria when she could have left him to sit alone, she was making what dune-dwellers considered a gesture of friendship, or perhaps something more.

Once, when he was very young, he’d played outside and come home with twigs and cut grass tangled up in his mane of curls, and his mother had tried to veil a fond smile, guided him onto a kitchen chair, and set to finger-combing them out. Then, as if a little light had been switched off inside her, she’d gone glassy-eyed and hunched in on herself like the willow tree that he now leaned against, and in a voice brimming with yearning, she’d spoken of Alderaan. She’d told him of how there had existed a style of braid for every occasion, whether plain and silver-threaded for mourning or elaborate and woven through with silken ribbon—green for luck and blue for peace—for a bride on her wedding day; how entire families would adopt a particular technique, and how a mother would pass it on to her daughter so that she might teach her spouse on the first night of their marriage; and how undoing the braids of another was a powerful expression of love and trust.

 _(Ben peeped into his parents’ bedroom to find Leia at her vanity table, her reflection framed by silver and mother-of-pearl. She hedged a weary smile when she looked up and saw him, her hands pausing on their way to unravel her crown braid, a gold-and-ruby hair ornament shaped to resemble a ladalum—one of her favourites, designed for the days where she yearned for her homeworld the most—already placed to the side. “I’m sorry about earlier, Ben,” she said with a defeated sigh. “I’ve been so stressed these past few weeks, what with the Senate being incapable of agreeing on_ anything, _but I know that’s not an excuse. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”_

_Eight-year-old Ben Organa shrugged. He’d been stung to tears when a tiny disagreement had escalated and she’d shouted at him to go to his room, but most of the hurt had ebbed away and what remained no longer felt so raw. “It’s okay, Mom,” he replied, then stepped over the threshold. Without a word, he replaced his mother’s fingers with his own, undoing her braid and sweeping her silver brush through her hair until it flowed, riverlike, to her hips. Their near-matching eyes met in the mirrorglass, and he ignored the dark circles that her makeup hadn’t quite managed to cover and let himself be gladdened instead by how something in her seemed to lift up at the sight of the forgiveness in his smile.)_

Memories fluttered about the confines of his skull like moths as they ate in comfortable silence. By the time he drew himself back into the present, the sun was slipping lower and lower down, painting the clouds’ underbellies with streaks of coral and rust that bled into the lakewater. In the changing light, Rey glowed golden, and he caught himself marvelling at how, if she turned the right way, still oblivious to his gaze, the hazel in her eyes flashed a bright, proud amber.

“You can go back inside,” he offered gently, “if you’d like.”

As soon as the words had jumped from his tongue, Rey shook her head. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be,” she told him, matter-of-fact, and he knew in an instant that it was true; that it was not obligation that had led her to look for him, but—though he didn’t understand why—a genuine desire to see him. She unlaced her boots, toed them off, and rested her bare feet in the grass, a pink tint spreading from her cheeks to where her pulse thrummed in her throat. “Hey, Ben,” she began, “how long has it been since you’ve just sat and watched the sun set?”

“Years,” Ben answered at once, foggily remembering how, in Theed, the last rays of light would gild the white marble statues lining the streets, as if those immortalised long-dead kings and queens of Naboo were wearing real headdresses of gold. How as time had passed and more pencil marks were added to the height chart on his wall, he’d come to dread sundown, for it had meant that he’d see monsters in the shadows, reaching for him with pale, bone-thin fingers.

“Well, so far, I haven’t found a better spot for it than this,” she said, gesturing out to the lake and the mountains towering over the thickets beyond, the icing-sugar snow dusted over their summits illumined by the colours weaving through the clouds. “Everything’s so bright and _alive_ here, even late at night,” she breathed, and though he was looking out at the view, trying to see his thriving new home through her eyes, he could hear the grin in her voice. “Jakku went as quiet as the grave as soon as darkness fell—I was used to it, but it felt _too_ quiet—but here, you can always hear the animals chittering and the birds singing and hooting. And the sunsets—” the smile entwined with her words faltered enough for him to notice, “—they’ve got a way of making every problem feel so small.”

He whipped around to face her. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s eating me up,” Rey started. Her voice was shrinking, cracking like an old branch, but she balled her fists and stared determinedly ahead. “This need to know who I am. You were saying that you wanted to meet whoever Ben Organa’s supposed to be, and I want the same for me. More than anything, I want it. I just—” She broke off, ushering in a breath that trembled as hard as the Force around her; part of him half-expected the lakewater to roil and churn as though seized by a storm in sympathy. “My parents—I don’t know if I’ve been dreaming of them dying, or if they somehow made it out. I don’t know if they named me Aurelia or not; if—if they loved me or not. There’s so many missing pieces of me, I worry that I’m going to lose the rest of me searching for them. That nobody’s going to want to be around somebody so incomplete.”

“Rey,” Ben murmured, his voice foreign to his own ears, too soft for a murderer like him. “I meant what I said earlier, when I told you that I don’t mind sharing this bond with you. I—I want to be around you, no matter who you are.” She turned to meet his gaze: her eyes were glitter-lit, and he ached to reach out and wipe away the tears that clung to her spiked lashes, threatening to spill over. “There are _no_ missing pieces of you,” he added, firmer now, willing her to believe it. His hands twitched with the urge to hold her—no, to crush her against him—and he made himself lay them in his lap, then insisted, “You’re whole as you are, regardless of where you were born or what you were named.”

She gave him a shaky little suggestion of a smile, and a sudden wave of warmth crested across the gossamer threads between them. It pooled in the space behind his ribs, washing away the slight chill in the air that came with nightfall in early autumn. “I’m glad you’re here, Ben,” she told him after a lengthy, thoughtful pause, and somehow, he didn’t think she meant _here_ as in by-the-lake-on-Alinor here, but back-with-her-at-last here.

 _Alive_ here. _Safe_ here.

The sun sank. Even as time wore on, her peace kept glowing in his chest—and in hers, he knew without needing to ask—as if a paper wishing-lantern had been tucked inside. The golds and coral-pinks shooting themselves across the sky gave way to a blanket of smoky purples and grey-blues, with the first shy stars peeking their silver faces out and the rising moon dyeing the lakewater in its image. Insects hiding in the long grasses began to creak out their chirps; somewhere in the boughs above them, the tiny paws of nocturnal woodland creatures drummed against branches as they climbed from tree to tree; and an owl’s calls, if he forgot himself and allowed his imagination to wander as freely as it had when he’d been a boy, seemed to be echoing Rey, demanding _who? who?_

Ben couldn’t have given it an answer even if he’d wanted to: though he fought to keep them open, his eyelids insisted on drooping shut, and beside him, Rey was halfway to dozing, resting her chin on the heels of her hands. _I can’t go back inside and leave her out here on her own,_ he decided, _not when her thoughts are being so cruel to her. Not when I promised her that she’d never be alone again._ He might have resolved to stay there with her all night, if that was what she wanted, had she not sprung up and jerked her head in the direction of the base, and as he heaved himself up and eased into step with her, he dared hope that she might follow him into his quarters and slip underneath his duvets once more.

But when they entered the base and made their way down the maze of corridors, she walked right past his quarters and headed straight for her own without sparing him a backward glance.

 _I’ve been a fool,_ he realised as he froze in place, his heart sinking so much that he feared he would look down and find it sprawled at his feet, _an utter fool._ He dug his teeth into his bottom lip until it stung to stop himself from blurting out a desperate _wait:_ with her curled up mere inches away from him, he’d felt somewhere close to invincible—both protected and like he could protect her, too, from _anything,_ the Knights of Ren and Snoke and the war be damned—but he’d gone and ruined it with that stupid, wonderful dream.

Rey came to a halt a few strides in front of him, then spun around, her brows furrowed. “A-Aren’t you coming?” she asked, not even trying to mask the note of hurt that rang out in her voice. “I’d—I’d assumed that this was going to be a regular thing.”

 _I would love nothing more than to wake up by your side every morning from now on,_ Ben thought, hastening to swallow it down before it could reach her and betray him. “It can be, if that’s what you want,” he replied as quickly as he could, “but aren’t people going to talk?”

She shrugged, and with a wry twist to her mouth, questioned, “Don’t they already?”

“If I were anybody else, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest, but this is _me._ One day, someone will see you inviting me into your quarters and they’ll assume…” With a frustrated shake of his head, he trailed off, his throat jammed to the tonsils with responses that he couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud: _that you’re fraternising with the enemy; that you’re a traitor; that I’m manipulating you; that we’ve become lovers in secret; that you’ve fallen for me._

“And? _Let_ them,” she insisted. Determination glinted in her eyes and hardened the set of her jaw. “They’re going to talk about us no matter what either of us do, and I’d be an idiot if I let that stop me from doing what I want.”

Unable to argue with that—she wasn’t wrong: during his first week on Alinor, he’d noticed that only a handful of people knew her for _her,_ and nor did it occur to most to learn—Ben retrieved his night-shirt and sleeping-pants, and once in her room, hurried to strip and dress himself while she was changing in the ‘fresher. He folded his old clothes and placed his boots by the door next to her own scuffed pair, then, breathless with the sheer _newness_ of being allowed in her space, eagerly scored every detail of his surroundings into his memory.

Everything was exactly as it had been when he’d done what he’d thought impossible and warned her about the assassination attempt planned against Leia, but tangible—though he wasn’t so bold as to try to touch anything—and twice as magical for it. Flowers in glasses of water lined with transparent coloured pebbles were arranged on her windowsill, and while all were beautiful, his gaze was drawn at once to a cluster of fluorescing blossoms that cast a gentle candle-glow over her pillow. A menagerie of healthy-looking plants sighed their leaves over the edges of her shelves, with miniature tools and pinecones and fat, round chestnuts and myriad birds’ feathers and a thick book filling the gaps between each pot.

The door to the ‘fresher slid open. Rey stepped out, and it was all Ben could do not to stare: somehow, her baggy shorts made her tanned legs look endless, and her hair, brushed into a shining sheet that fell about her shoulders, had that strange, just-awakened part of him longing to run his fingers through it. She pulled back her duvet and tapped the bedsheet to beckon him in, and something about that gesture was enough to send his pulse racing until its furious tattoo drowned out the rustling of her slipping in to join him. He might have fretted, worrying that she’d hear and be unnerved by it, if not for the other, fainter heartbeat pounding to the same rhythm as his, as if he could press his palm to his chest and feel the drumming of a pair of hearts nestled within.

Unknowingly—she wasn’t aware of it, he was certain, or else she’d have sprung away—she’d positioned herself so close to him that he could _smell_ her. With the wall already an inch from his back, he had nowhere to move, and whenever he took a breath, he found himself inhaling the fading scent of grass that clung to her hair and the vanilla-and-citrus medley of her soaps and shampoos.

Somehow, despite the heavenly warmth of her body radiating into his and reminding him that she was _there,_ the tiniest of fingerbreadths away, Ben managed to relax enough to drift. Before he knew what wild urge had seeped through the foggy, dreamy haze not all that far from sleep and possessed him, he’d reached out and rested his hand on her hip.

As soon as it dawned on him what he’d done, he jolted and wrenched his hand back with a rushed, “Sorry.”

Rey turned a bit to better see him, and in the flamelike light shining from the fluorescent blossoms on the windowsill, her eyes were wide. “I don’t mind,” she said, so softly that for a moment, he thought he might have misheard her.

His heart stumbled and almost gave out then and there; he felt it as hers froze, too, their breath catching in tandem. “You don’t mind it,” he repeated, hoarse, as though hoping to make it real by speaking it out loud.

“Makes me feel safe,” she murmured in a voice vague with tiredness, and then she let out a small huff of a laugh. “Stupid, right?”

“No,” Ben replied. He returned his hand before he could lose his nerve, and in an instant, his mouth went dry: her t-shirt had ridden up, leaving him touching her bare skin, and though he waited for her to flinch, she stayed still. “Not stupid at all.” After a pause, where he desperately tried to ignore the flood of _want_ coursing through his bloodstream, he added, quieter now, “It makes me feel safe, too.”

Instead of giving him a verbal response, he heard her drag in a deep, fortifying breath, keeping it in until his own lungs ached. Releasing it and holding herself tripwire-taut, she ever so slowly reached down to cover his hand with hers and interlace their fingers. The ethereal threads between them shivered at the touch, then the bond began to brim with tranquillity like nothing he’d experienced before—a sense of overwhelming _rightness_ that filled him from crown to toe—and as he let his heavy eyelids flutter shut at last, Ben couldn’t help but smile to himself.

Behind his closed eyes, waves danced.

 

* * *

 

As dreams washed over her and bathed her in their shifting colours, a memory rose up like the tide—at least, to Rey, it _felt_ like a memory, so realistic that it seemed impossible for her mind to have conjured it up from nothing.

In it, she was small: smaller than she’d been during her first life on Nysa, and certainly smaller than she’d been when Unkar Plutt had led her away in exchange for all of Ben Organa’s credits, a string of sunblaze meditation beads, and an ornate music box with the moon made miniature inside. She was so little that the ocean spreading out before her was an entire galaxy of its own, with clusters of orange star-shaped creatures for constellations, wisps of foam for nebulae, and strands of glass-green seaweed streaking across the shore for comets. Bells tinkled in the distance, and her laughter rang out in bright peals as the water—not steel-blue and storm-whipped like Ahch-To’s roaring seas, but brilliant like nothing she’d ever seen before—lapped at her ankles.

“How big is the sea?” she heard herself ask, as if she were merely eavesdropping on herself. Her voice was so young that her heart leapt into her throat at the sound, and in her horror, one thought stuck like a thorn in her mind: _this is how old I was when—if what I’m seeing in those dreams is real—I lost everything. My name, my parents, my home._ Stray silver petals swirled about her toes and were swept away by the current, and with a strange sinking feeling deep in her chest, she watched them go. “And what’s in it?”

“It’s bigger than you or I could ever imagine, star-child,” answered a man’s voice. The air rippled as though somebody had crouched down beside her, but no matter how hard she struggled against the boundaries of the dream, gritting her teeth and whispering a _please_ to the Force, she couldn’t twist herself around to see him. Something in her—a tiny part of her heart not much larger than a seed—knew that his face would be soft and kind with gold-flecked eyes to match her own; that his hands would be callused and roughened from manual work, but unbelievably gentle, too. “And as for what’s in there,” he went on, taking on a storyteller’s tone that made her want to cling to every word and savour it, “some say that there are whole kingdoms of Melodies hidden beneath the surface, with palaces of coral and crowns of scallops and spindle shells.”

“I know stories about them,” Rey told him, “but they’re all sad, aren’t they? Like the one about the princess who turned into seafoam because her prince didn’t love her back?”

“Ah, well,” said the man— _Dad,_ she caught herself wanting to call him. In the wastes of Jakku with no company besides her cloth-and-twine doll, she’d dreamed of what it might be like to have parents, and when she’d tried to imagine a father, he’d been the mirror of this man: loving, tender, and _hers._ “I happen to know a story about _another_ sea-princess, but this one has a happy ending.”

She perked up at once. “Those are the best kind! Tell me!”

“All right,” he—her father?—agreed. “Once,” he started, “there were two kingdoms under the sea, both plagued by a strange curse that had troubled them for as long as anybody could remember. In the first, the waters were shadowy and pitch-dark, and if its citizens looked up, they had only the very faintest pinpricks of stars and glowing algae for light, but in the second, they never got to see the night. There, they were miserable, for it was far too bright to sleep, and in the first kingdom, they were just as miserable without the warmth of the sun. When they left the land to dwell in the ocean for good, the freshly-Changed younger Melodies would simply forget seeing either the sun during the day or the moon at night, as if it had never existed at all.”

The vivid images that he’d painted in her mind didn’t falter even as he lifted her up, sat her on his knee, and continued, “In the kingdom of constant daylight, there was a princess whose scales glittered gold like sunshine on the waves. Sometimes, when she grew exhausted from weaving curtains and blindfolds to help her subjects block out the worst of the sun’s glare, she’d swim to the outskirts of her world and watch the prince of the kingdom where it was always dark, whom she was forbidden to approach under _any_ circumstances.”

Rey frowned. “Why?”

“Each kingdom positively despised the other—jealousy, you might say, or maybe they just hated what they couldn’t understand.” The briefest note of sorrow swelled in his voice, and the need to know _why_ hummed beneath her skin until she thought she might combust with it. “Our princess would see him stealing away to near the surface, where he’d whisper light into the algae to make it glow, and after a while, they met and fell in love. But,” he added, the word jerking her, “they couldn’t be together, he told her; the sea-witch had staked her claim on his life since before he Changed and grew his midnight-black tail, and so he was forever bound to serve her. And that might have been the end of it, but the sea-princess was stubborn—as stubborn as you.” Her new storyteller gave her a playful tug on the ear. “She challenged the sea-witch to a duel: if she won, the sea-witch would have to let the prince go free, and never again take another servant. If she lost, she, too, would work for the sea-witch for the rest of her days.”

“Did the sea-princess win?” Rey asked.

“Of course she won,” came the reply, and she beamed. “For it was a kind of magic that she used to do her weaving, and so she called the water plants to coil around the sea-witch and bind her so that she could only struggle and scream. Defeated, the witch sank to the bottom of her cave in disgrace, and the prince was freed to do as he pleased.”

Flashes of years-old thoughts came to her then, flickering by like reels upon reels of staticky holos. Her younger self cast her mind back as far as she felt it would go and remembered the other tales she knew: cherished fairy-stories of day-wolves and night-wolves who defied their differences and refused to be kept apart, and the dawns and the dusks in which they frolicked together. With hope in her high voice, she prompted, “And he and the princess broke the curse, didn’t they?”

“The spell that their kingdoms had suffered under for generations shattered all because, rather than giving in to hatred, they managed to fall in love. And the very moment she kissed him after beating the witch—” her storyteller pointed with a workman’s hand just like she’d imagined, and she followed it to a fiery sunset unspooling across the sky and spilling into the water, “—all of a sudden, beautiful colours began dancing through the sea. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, not in living memory. In breaking the curse, the princess and the prince had brought dusk and dawn to the ocean.”

“Wow,” she murmured. “I want to swim in the sea, too,” she told him, almost breathless in her eagerness, “and see the colours and the Melodies, if they’re really in there.”

“Oh, you will, little star-child,” he said, ruffling her windswept hair. His words were so full of conviction that—if she were able—Rey would have whirled around to face him and cried, _but I never did!_ “When all of this trouble dies down, your mom and I—we’ll teach you until you’re as good as us,” he promised her. “Now, shall we go home?”

 _But I don’t want to go home,_ Rey thought in desperation, staring out at the waters as if to carve them into every nook and cranny of her memory, wave by glimmering wave. An ache sprouted in the centre of her chest and unfurled, winding tendrils around each rib until she had no room left to draw breath. _Please, I_ am _home,_ she begged, though already wakefulness was tugging at her and sapping her surroundings of colour. _Don’t make me have to leave again._

Against her will, her eyes snapped open. When she had to blink, it was not against a fierce honey-and-rust sunset but the soft, silken grey half-light of predawn, and instead of her storyteller, Ben lay beside her, his hand still resting on her hip and their fingers still interlocked. Though he was a scant few inches away, the bond thrumming in time with each of his slow heartbeats, a sudden sense of loss and loneliness crashed into her with enough force that she thought it might rouse him. She swallowed a sob, and was about to try her hardest to go back to sleep and scavenge what scraps remained of the dream when—as though it had been _guided_ there—her gaze landed on the shelf where Finn’s birthday gift to her stood.

Her encyclopaedia of all the galaxy’s plants and animals.

_Silver blossoms._

Before she could truly register what she was doing, she’d lurched out of bed and scrambled for it, hefted it up, then knelt on the floor with it, all the while clutching it like a lifeline. The encyclopaedia contained stamp-sized drawings of what, to her, seemed to be _every_ plant that had ever been discovered, along with tiny sections of text detailing their characteristics, when they came into bloom and, most importantly, _where_ they could be found. And if she knew where her silver blossoms belonged, then—

“Rey?” Ben mumbled, his voice husky with sleep. “What are you doing down there?”

Rey didn’t respond for a moment, too preoccupied with rifling through the crepe-thin pages, scanning each of the intricate illustrations until she caught a little flash of silver. _Chime trees._ At last, she had a name for them, and they were chime trees. “Did you see my dream?” she asked him in a rush, aware that her words were jumbling together. “I saw the flowers that I’ve been dreaming of since Ahch-To, and I can’t believe I’ve never thought of just looking them up in this—” she jabbed at the book, “—but I’ve _found_ them.” She whipped her head up to meet his widening eyes, and in a voice that was almost as fragile as a whisper, said, “They could help me find where I’m from, Ben.”

The sheets rustled as Ben sat bolt upright, determinedly trying to adjust his vision against the pale morning light, but Rey shifted her focus back down to the book in her lap and read, slow enough to savour each word. Chime trees—so named for the blossoms that rang like dozens of miniature bells when stirred by a breeze—were native to oceanside areas on the planets Arpenia, Direnni, Ixia, Pallas, and Ven. She hugged the encyclopaedia close to her chest and experimented with the feel of the planets’ names on her tongue, repeating them in hushed awe as if they were a chant.

Arpenia, Direnni, Ixia, Pallas, and Ven. Somewhere out there was her _home._

“I’m Rey, born by the ocean,” she whispered to herself, and with a small frisson of glee, she thought of that Jakkuvian superstition about things spoken aloud. Ben had clambered out of her bed to see, and she didn’t notice the wetness clinging to her lower lashes until he gently wiped it away with a thumb, his own eyes shining. She reached for him and took hold of his hand before he could withdraw it, beaming through her tears until her cheeks started to ache. “That’s why I’ve been dreaming of the sea for so long,” she continued, not caring to raise her voice so as to hide the cracks that would doubtless appear, “because it’s _mine,_ and all I need to do now is find it.”

“We will,” Ben assured her softly, interlacing their fingers and offering her a little smile. And while Rey’s mind was overflowing with wolves and sea-princesses and the song of ocean wind and ringing bells, it didn’t go amiss that he’d said _we_ and not _you,_ as if he planned on being right by her side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you so much for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. :)
> 
> [Consitor Sato](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Plant_Surge#) is also known as Plant Surge, and it's a Light Side ability. By channelling life energy into a plant, a Force user can speed up its growth, change how it grows, or even use it to ensnare an opponent.
> 
> Those of you who've seen _Solo: A Star Wars Story_ (which I unexpectedly loved!) will know who Rey's referring to when she thinks of the [_Falcon_ 's smart-mouthed navigation system](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/L3-37). 
> 
> [Melodies](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Melodie), introduced in the Legends universe, are basically _Star Wars_ 's answer to mermaids. Young Melodies live on land until they Change, growing their tails and becoming water-breathers.


	11. Bloodruby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we get started, Perperuna93 made [this gorgeous moodboard](http://perperuna93.tumblr.com/post/178735103157/moodboard-for-the-golden-sun-and-the-silver-moon) for _The Golden Sun and the Silver Moon_ , and Amy Pence turned our discussion of Jakkuvian and Alderaanian courtship customs in the comments of Chapter Ten into [this beautiful little fic from Luke's PoV](https://pastebin.com/iVQebpq3). ❤

— _and together! Together, we will strive to cure the galaxy of the plague of weakness and lawlessness that has infected it, poisoning the once-beautiful oceans of Naboo and corrupting the governments of every system—_

General Hux’s tinny voice cut through the _Finalizer’_ s recirculated air, reeling off yet another pre-recorded propaganda speech that seemed to have been written solely to allow him to hear himself talk. It was his latest attempt at improving morale following some utter disaster of a foiled assassination somewhere and, judging by the steady stream of mocking whispers that flowed after each finished, as ill-fated as its predecessors. For once, Phasma was grateful for it—as grateful as one _could_ be to have to listen to the same clichéd promises to _restore the order that the galaxy all but cries out for_ and _ensure victory once and for all_ and _exterminate the cowardly Resistance, who burrow away like loth-rats_ on the dot of every hour until the ship’s harsh lights dimmed to simulate night-time.

Even now, more than half a year after she’d stared down the barrel of a blaster and lowered the shields around Starkiller Base, defeat still stung at her, sticking to her as though it were a taint. Like a second suit of armour, the knowledge of how she’d failed—and worse, how every soul aboard knew it; how the rumour had sparked and then blazed through entire units of stormtroopers—weighed heavy on her back.

On days like today, she strode through the ship’s labyrinths of corridors and saw, through the tinted lenses of her helmet, the subtlest curl of a lip from an officer who ought to have been her inferior, or heard her own name niggling at her ears, though Hux’s blustering dampened the sound and blurred the individual words. On other, rarer days, her stormtroopers ducked their heads and quickened their paces as they marched past her in near-perfect unison, and she forced herself to believe that everything—her upbringing, her scars, and what she’d become for the First Order—hadn’t been all for nothing.

She couldn’t help the staticky sigh of relief that stemmed from her lips once the door to her quarters slid shut. They were quiet and devoid of luxury from the basic bedding to the sonic—not actual water—shower, and there, she attended to herself as she’d been taught from the childhood she only half-remembered. Her body was a machine: if it hungered, she fed it to fuel it and not please it, eating in private from a stash of veg-meat rations and protein cubes. If it grew exhausted, she gave it seven hours of sleep and no more. And if its mind ran overmuch, as it was now, she stripped to an undershirt and a pair of leggings, then exercised where nobody, not even she, could see her face to know that she was human. Months ago, she’d thrown out her standard-issue mirror, and not even the cleaning droids had dared to question her.

Her muscles soon started to burn from the exertion, but she still couldn’t stop herself from _thinking._ Not just about her humiliation, but about her homeworld, too, as if she _missed_ it like a sentimental creature.

On Parnassos, a bleak, barren planet littered with towering spires of obsidian-black rock and caves with man-eating skinwolves lurking deep in their bellies, they’d believed in gods. Once, when she’d been small, when winning or losing a fight had meant either getting to eat or going without, she’d had a little carved stone figurine of a warrior-god who held a sword aloft in one hand and a set of scales in the other, where he weighed up a person’s strengths and weaknesses and decided each morning whether to bless them or curse them.

If such a deity was real, he’d picked today to laugh at her. Midway through her hundredth push-up, a series of neat, smart raps rang out against her door, and Phasma let out an agitated growl. She knew without a moment’s doubt who those knocks belonged to, and he was barely tolerable even at the best of times. Nonetheless, she hurried to ram her armour and her helmet back on, then slammed her palm against the button on the wall that would open the door.

“General Hux,” she said to the man at her threshold. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Phasma,” Hux replied, his voice taut. In the countless propaganda holos that flickered on the walls of every dining hall, training facility, and barracks, his image had been not-so-subtly altered to an almost unnatural flawlessness, giving him smooth alabaster skin and immaculate hair. But here, he was pinched and pale-faced with great dark circles daubed under his eyes, and though he couldn’t have been more than a few inches shorter than her, he stood stiff-spined as though to make himself a fingerbreadth taller. Without preamble, he informed her, “The Supreme Leader wishes to speak with you.”

The adrenaline still pumping through her veins told her that she ought to snarl at the sneering way he’d said _you,_ like nobody would possibly want to speak with her, least of all the Supreme Leader. Common sense—and the sneaking suspicion that Hux was right; why _would_ Snoke want to see her when he’d never asked for her before—intervened in the nick of time, and so she fought the urge to back him against the durasteel wall and watch as he tried in vain to hide his quaking.

“What business does Snoke have with me?” she managed, glad for the modulator that disguised the tremor, however small it was, that had stolen into her words. It was another failure, tiny but enough to grate on her nerves: after a lifetime of needing to be strong to survive, by now, she should have eliminated every last shred of frailty in her.

“He did not deem it fit to tell me,” Hux said with a sniff. “I expect,” he added, his wan lip twisting with distaste, as if it pained him to admit it, “that I shall have to find out alongside you.”

It would do her no good, Phasma decided as she let Hux lead her across the ship to an audience chamber, to waste time wondering what the Supreme Leader might want with her—she ought to be using those precious minutes to brace herself against him; to shape herself into a steel-and-adamant fortress that not even he could break through. She’d listened to second-hand stormtrooper gossip and learned that when Kylo Ren had been retrieved from the collapsing Starkiller Base, near-death and hellbent on batting away every med-droid that risked approaching until the blood loss drained all the fight left in him, Snoke had considered simply ordering that his injured arm be amputated rather than fixed, as if his apprentice’s body was not his own but a mere tool. Rumours spread by whispers hushed with fear had warned her that Snoke could stop a grown man’s heart with just a clench of his fist, or slink into a person’s mind and compel them to bury their weapon in their throat.

He was a cruel man, if he was a man at all, but Phasma knew cruel.

_She_ was cruel.

The door to the audience chamber hissed shut behind her, sealing her inside a room that was cold and wreathed in shadows, and aside from a row of dusty seats at the very back and a holoprojector before her, empty enough for their footsteps to echo. Beside her, Hux stood ruler-straight, his eyes trained up high, and it was there that—she had to cage her gasp between her teeth and struggle with all her might to gulp it down—Snoke’s hologram flared to life.

Kylo Ren and Hux were the only people in the whole First Order who’d ever seen his face, and so theories of how he might look had simmered on the tongues of everyone aboard, exaggerated like stories told to keep children awake in their beds. To some, the entirety of his skin was marred with livid purple lightning-strike scars, and he’d chosen not to have them healed as a grim message— _no one can kill me._ To others, his eyes were as yellow as a Sith’s, and he’d had his organs replaced with pulmonodes in a quest to become more than mortal. When his mechanical heart beat, they’d said, it didn’t make a _thump-thump-thump_ sound; it _clicked._

Back then, she’d scoffed and dismissed their tales as nothing more than fairy-stories, but now, she saw that she hadn’t been prepared. Atop a stone throne sat a figure who towered all the way up to the ceiling, his skin as pale as a drowned man’s, his mouth warped with a tangle of ruined flesh, and most of his forehead caved in by a jagged wound several inches deep, as though once upon a time, somebody had tried to cleave him apart.

Anchoring herself, doing all that she could not to bolt for the door, Phasma made herself mirror Hux and dipped into a low bow.

“Ah, Captain Phasma,” Snoke started as she righted herself, that mangled mouth snaking into an imitation of a welcoming smile, “or perhaps you feel that PM-4673 suits you better?” He drummed fingers as white as exposed bone against the arms of his throne, his stare piercing-sharp and waiting for her to betray even the slightest sign that the barb—her _old_ name from before she’d earned the one that she now wore—had hit its mark. Determined to give away nothing but flinty silence, Phasma tightened her jaw behind her helmet, but Snoke was undeterred. “It appears that in his haste to bring you to me, General Hux mislaid his manners. He must have neglected to tell you that while we speak, I would prefer to see your face.”

_Not a request,_ she recognised at once. _A demand._ Her fingers shook as she reached under her chin and unlatched her helmet, biting the inside of her cheek to quell the bolt of irritation that shot through her at being ordered around like a stumbling new recruit. Clutching it by her middle as though to guard herself where she was most vulnerable, she willed iron into her gaze and met Snoke’s too-blue eyes. Something in them went through her in the worst, most invasive of ways, making her feel stripped down to the marrow, as if she were no more than a machine pried apart for him to peer in and assess the components ticking away under the layers of muscle and sinew.

“Rest assured, PM-4673, that were it not of the utmost importance, I would not have deigned to involve you in such matters,” Snoke continued. There it was again, unmistakable in his tone: that eagerness to brush her off as just another malfunctioning cog in an engine far greater than she could ever hope to be. “You are aware, I presume, of Kylo Ren’s disappearance?”

Phasma almost burst out with a bark of laughter—how could she _not_ be aware? The murmurs had begun as a trickle, then a river, then a flood, all repeating the same thing: _Kylo Ren is gone._ He’d stolen a TIE Interceptor in plain sight, they’d said, and had flown off and abandoned it on some middle-of-nowhere Outer Rim rock, crushed as if he’d held it between both hands and _squeezed_ until its walls gave out.

After that, there was nothing of him. There had been no sightings, or nobody willing to talk if they _had_ seen him, and the match-head sized tracking chip that Hux had embedded into Ren’s belt had been destroyed. For all she knew—or cared, for that matter—he’d died on that backwater planet, or fled to the deserts of Tatooine to farm banthas until his hair went silver with age, or run away to a far-off Sith Space hellhole to become powerful enough to usurp Snoke and whip the galaxy into shape himself.

She had to dig deep within herself to find her voice again, and when she spoke, it sounded too fragile. Too _human._ “Yes, Supreme Leader.”

“You will agree, then, when I say that not only did he betray me, he betrayed _us.”_ Snoke leaned forwards and balled his hands into fists, the bones there standing out so starkly that for one delirious moment, she feared that they’d pierce through the skin. “I was mistaken. I assumed that he would flee to the Resistance—” here, at the very mention of the word, hatred came to a boil in his voice and pulled back his scarred lips, baring a row of teeth like a shark’s, “—and be rejected by what little remains of his family, then seek me out once more. After all, Ren is stubborn and wilful, but ultimately a fool. A malleable child in dire need of a stern hand to guide him. His heart is weak, as both of yours are not, and that is why I need you.”

At the edge of her vision, she saw Hux puff out his chest, the beginnings of a thin smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. It was all she could do not to whirl around and slap the pride right out of him. The events that had led to his rise to power had been no secret amongst the higher-ups of the First Order, some of them now curiously dead—and even more curious, Phasma thought, was the fact that so many of their colleagues had lifted a disbelieving eyebrow when the causes were deemed natural, but had remained silent.

Those who were old enough remembered a slip of a bastard-born boy, as skinny and breakable as a dried-out reed, who’d joined and progressed through the ranks at an astonishing rate until Brendol Hux had collapsed at a gala, his cheeks blue-grey and his bloodshot eyes wild and accusing. Brendol had sneered at his son and thought him useless, but even the lowliest of maintenance workers would have connected the goblet of poisoned Arkanisian wine with the man who’d shed no tears at his father’s funeral, then taken the title of General just days later. And yet, compared to her, Armitage Hux with his skin as flawless and white as lily petals had been spoiled.

He’d never starved.

He was neither scarred nor callused.

He, like most of the galaxy’s children, had been born with a name.

“If I may interrupt, Supreme Leader,” Hux began, “by chance, I intercepted Ren not long before he vanished. Not an hour prior, I’d learned that Leia Organa and several dozen senators had somehow evaded what was to be a top-secret assassination attempt. I had my suspicions then, of course, especially after questioning him, but now I believe wholeheartedly that Ren intervened to save her life and fled to avoid the consequences.”

Snoke barely flicked his gaze Hux’s way as he replied, “That much would be obvious even to a happabore, General.” Against her will, Phasma felt a flash of satisfaction at how Hux’s shoulders sagged by an ever-so-slight amount, and at how he gave a tiny jerk of a nod, as though to recover himself. “If he were any other man, I would kill him myself for such blatant disloyalty, but I want him _back,”_ Snoke went on, the last word somewhere dangerously close to a snarl. “There is another who could replace him as Master of the Knights of Ren, but that is not my concern. I _need_ him; I have plans that cannot come to fruition without him and him alone.”

“Perhaps if we were to lure Organa into a trap?” Fervour rushed Hux’s words out in a breathless stream, and when she turned her head a fraction of an inch to see him, his eyes were alight with a hungry glint that reminded her of a skin-wolf catching the scent of blood on the wind. It shouldn’t have unsettled her like it did—all three of them were murderers; her own purpose was to make ruthless, efficient killers out of quivery-lipped, soft-hearted boys who fumbled the first time a blaster was placed in their hands—but something about it had her glancing away, feeling oddly like she’d peered into his soul and recoiled at what she’d found. “If Ren is weak for his mother, then a threat to her life would surely—”

“Leia Organa is wiser than she appears.” Snoke waved a dismissive hand, cutting him off. “The scavenger from Jakku, however, is not.”

“That sand-rat?” Hux’s nose wrinkled. “Supreme Leader, the girl is _feral._ I would be shocked to learn that somebody from such a festering cesspit of a planet is capable of a feat as basic as writing her own _name.”_

A near-smile tilted up Snoke’s lips again, leaving them uneven, one side hitching a hair higher than the other. “She is young and naïve,” he corrected him. “Lonely,” he added with relish, closing his eyes for a second as if to savour the sound—no, like he could _taste_ the girl’s yearning to belong. “A failed stormtrooper, the last Jedi turned hermit, and the promise of a warm bed in which to sleep—trivial things, but they were all it took for her to sign herself over to the Resistance. Swaying her would be almost effortless, and were I to direct her to me, Ren would have no option but to return, believing himself her saviour. You, General, are to hold off your attacks on the Resistance and their allies for the time being.” Unhesitating, Hux nodded his assent, and Snoke shifted his laser-point focus to her. “Do you understand, PM-4673? Until I have the girl, you will withdraw your troops and cancel all planned missions.”

The girl had spent most of her life as a scavenger, Phasma thought, and—though remembering her once-home felt treasonous, especially in front of Snoke—she’d been more than familiar with the scavengers of Parnassos. Above all, they knew how to survive. In their world, trust had to be earned, and any foolish enough to go running headfirst into a trap like that would have died out in the wastes long before they were full-grown.

Still, she forced her expression into something resembling neutrality, wishing more than anything for the sanctuary of her helmet and its voice modulator, then said, “I understand.”

“Is that doubt I sense, PM-4673?” Snoke asked, and though she lacked the words to describe his voice as well as an educated person like Hux might, she knew how it made her feel to hear: chilled, like somebody had just walked over her grave. “One would be forgiven for thinking that an individual as… _well-acquainted_ with her lifestyle as you would be more inclined to agree.”

Invisible fingers reached across the stars and _into_ her, sifting through her mind as easily as combing through sand. Stirred by the intrusion, memories fluttered before her eyes like shreds of paper, too quick for her to seize and stow away—

_(A newborn girl, wrapped in faded, ragged sheets yanked from a bed, keeping quiet even as she was carried from a tumbledown shack in the village to the mouth of a cave by cliffs as black as midnight water. It went unspoken amongst the villagers, but each of Parnassos’ unwanted children had met the same fate, that girl would one day learn: when the storms lulled, they were laid by a cave for either the skin-wolves within or the wandering warrior clans, whichever found them first. The woman who’d given birth to her had tucked a small hand-carved figurine of a warrior-god into the sheets around her for luck._

_She would need it._

_That same girl, her blonde hair a rough-shorn tangle matted with mud or blood or both, bent double and panting for breaths that scraped against her throat as she dragged them in. Laughter rolled over her like thunder, and a hand at her back ushered her to a campfire, where somebody presented her with a cup of distilled seawater and a hefty portion of flame-cooked fish. Behind her, the boy she’d beaten climbed to his feet and went hungry to his bedroll._

_Years later, when she was older, that girl—now an adolescent, around thirteen but with ancient, haunted eyes—was dying. She’d lost, this time, and with thinned lips and voices weighed down with sighs, the clan had pronounced her wounds too serious to use up valuable resources on trying to repair them. When the man in his crisp, rain-soaked uniform approached her, so out of place that he looked like a conjuring of her imagination, she didn’t have it in her to scramble for a weapon or even lift her head. His name, Commandant Brendol Hux, meant nothing to her, and when he asked for hers in return, the act of shaking her head to say that she didn’t have one hurt too much to bear._

_He could take her away from Parnassos to people who could fix her and train her and make her great, he’d told her, his words dripping with promise. Just this once, and just for her. Just because the warriors of her clan had called her the strongest, and who was he to let such an opportunity go to waste?)_

—and Phasma gasped as she came up for air, a sharp, desperate sound that echoed off the chamber’s durasteel walls. “No, never,” she rasped, then remembered Hux beside her and made herself straighten. “No, Supreme Leader. I have never doubted you.”

“Good.” Snoke settled back in his throne, an amused lilt to the word. In that moment, she allowed herself to realise that all of the rumours—hearts brought to a halt by a squeeze of a fist; those who dared stand against him tricked into turning their weapons against themselves—were true, and that if he’d so desired, he could have struck her down then and there. “You both may go,” he told them. “I shall contact you again once the girl is with me.”

Aware as though from a distance that she was lagging behind, Phasma followed Hux out of the audience chamber. Queasiness roiled in her gut, as if the ship was tilting beneath her feet and leaving her uncertain of where, if anywhere, would be safe for her to stand. She was meant to be burning with humiliation, she supposed, but could only find anger inside herself, heating up in her chest like a star on the verge of going supernova. A dull ache told her that she’d been clinging to her helmet in a grip so tight that it had bleached her fingertips white, and she was about to shove it back on and stalk away to train until she forgot the entire ordeal when Hux rounded on her, two blotchy spots of pink rising on his cheeks.

“You _doubted_ the Supreme Leader?”

“You didn’t?” Phasma countered, cocking a brow. “Did you leave that impressive brain of yours on the bridge before you went to fetch me? He speaks as if he only has to say the word and the girl will drop everything to fly herself to him.”

Hux’s nostrils flared and the lines of his body went taut, every muscle in him thrumming with the tension of a man who wanted to hit her but had enough of a self-preservation instinct not to try. “You would do well,” he hissed instead, “to keep those kinds of thoughts inside your helmet, where they belong. If I were you, I would spend less time being so recalcitrant and more time being grateful that you have a career—a _life—_ at all, because the Supreme Leader was _not_ inclined to mercy when he learned of your little stunt on Starkiller Base.” For emphasis, he tapped once on a scuff mark on her helmet, and had she not been so taken aback by his boldness, she’d have snapped his wrist. “You _owe_ me, Captain. You ought to at least start with showing me some _respect.”_

Without waiting for a response, he whipped around and flounced off down the corridor. Phasma listened to the rapid clicking of his heels against the floor, and when she could no longer hear it, she drove her fist into the wall, the burst of pain somehow exorcising the images of Snoke’s twisted face and half-starved Parnassosi girls and scavengers bathed in brilliant blue saberlight from her mind.

_Let Snoke try,_ she thought grimly. _Let them both try._

 

* * *

 

In the middle of the forest clearing, Rey dodged Ben’s strike and parried it with one of her own, cat-fast. “All—All right,” she managed to huff, flushed and breathless, “shall we call it a day? I feel like my heart’s going to explode if it beats any harder.”

Ben paused mid-swing and raised an eyebrow, his lips quirking up in one of his slow, hesitant smiles. “I’ll take that as an admission of defeat,” he told her, a teasing note in his voice. He powered off his borrowed low-voltage training lightsaber and clipped it into his belt, then swiped a lock of sweat-damp hair from his forehead and asked, unable to hide the tentative hope in his eyes, “Do you want to go back inside, or do you want to stay out here for a while? With me?”

Mirroring him, Rey thumbed her own saber’s activation button, quenching its dim glow. “It’s been a while since you last taught me anything,” she said after a moment of thought, “and as glad as I am that I won’t have to worry about bruising my backside if I fall over when I’m sparring with you or Luke, I want to learn something new.” She secured her weapon at her hip and added dryly, “Something that _isn’t_ hours of working on my forms.”

Two weeks had gone by since she and Ben had met in a training room for the first time, when she’d steeled her nerves and asked if they could work together. He’d lifted her up then, holding her aloft with just moon-spun silver thread, and she’d grinned with glee and the thrill of looking down to see her feet dangling so far from the floor—because Ben would never hurt her; she knew it all the way to her bones—until that lightness had fizzed through the whole of her. The next day, she’d explained Consitor Sato to him, showing him how she’d unknowingly kept her plants alive long past their natural lifespans, and though she’d been the one instructing him, the pure, unguarded _wonder_ in his expression had taught her that a heart could soften for somebody entirely under its owner’s nose. Rey had only realised the true extent of it that night, when he’d reached for her in his half-asleep state and she’d let herself inch her hand down to intertwine their fingers.

Each night since then, they’d shared a bed, whether she was ushering him into her quarters or he was leaving his door cracked open for her, waiting inside as if expecting her to change her mind about coming to him. Some part of her—some strange new _thing_ blooming within her, bright as a gorsa blossom—was more disappointed than she ought to be whenever he shuffled away from her while sleeping, and she always felt a flicker-quick spark of warmth spread like a sunrise through her when he drowsily wrapped his strong, scarred arms around her, his soft whuffs of breath lulling her back into dreams.

Of course, whatever was unfurling between them, neither would risk spoiling it by voicing it, and nor did she know how to try. But in the dark, with their pulses slowing into one call-and-response drumbeat and their heads fogging with the hazy beginnings of pleasant dreams, it felt like he was saying without words what she’d always yearned to hear: _safe now, you’re safe, I’m here, I won’t go._

Ben’s smile faltered and pitched rueful. Unease spiked in the bond, and she got the vaguest ghost of an impression that he’d stoppered a flood of memories, keeping them at bay so that they wouldn’t slam into her. “You wouldn’t want to know half of the things that you could learn from me,” he warned her with a gentleness that didn’t match the sudden hardness in his eyes. “I would love to teach you more, Rey,” he murmured, “but my education suffers from a distinct lack of not-awful things.”

“And I’m sure I could say the same.” Rey echoed the tilt of his mouth, crossing her arms in front of her. After all, there was no use pretending otherwise—Jakku’s lessons, scored into her like the tallies she’d etched into the wall of her AT-AT, had amounted to little more than _trust nobody_ and _try your best not to die._ “Unless you already know what a durasteel quarterstaff sounds like when it hits somebody square in the head?”

As soon as she’d set the words free, he winced and clenched his fist at his side, as though imagining how it would feel to ram it through the faces of those who’d given her cause to defend herself. When he pressed his lips together in a frown, she recognised in an instant that he’d seen the truth in what she’d said. She’d learned _him,_ somehow. Without her noticing, it had become ingrained in her that he’d work his mouth when nervous, or swipe his hand through his hair, or swallow with enough force to make his throat bob. She’d mapped out the way his smiles came into being, and she’d grown to understand that her favourite—the tiny dream-dazed one that unfolded itself across his lips when he awoke to find her still curled up beside him—meant something, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what it was.

If his thoughts were anything like her own, it meant _I’m so happy that you’re here._

“Okay,” he agreed after a deep, bracing inhale. “Have you ever heard of an ability known as Force Shadow?”

Rey cast her mind back and searched, but found nothing but scraps. For a moment, she struggled to draw breath as wistfulness clamped around her lungs: years ago, before Luke’s time, when Jedi had dwelled in even the most far-flung corners of the galaxy and when the Sith had been more than mere legends, she might have had someone—a whispering friend, perhaps, or a master who’d never have to bear the anchor-weight of being the last of his kind—to tell her all about it. In a way, Luke, too, was a scavenger, salvaging what he could of those dead Jedi, and she couldn’t begin to fathom just how much had been lost to him. It made her wonder—selfishly, maybe—if she in turn would ever be fit to guide those who might come after her.

“Luke might have mentioned it once or twice,” she said, giving her head a small shake to dispel the thoughts gathering like thunderclouds. “It’s Dark Side, isn’t it?”

Ben nodded. “It’s an ancient power, one from the era of the Je’daii,” he told her. “Tens of thousands of years ago, the servants of the Infinite Empire used it to see across space and hunt down planets strong in the Force for their masters. I only discovered it through the texts that Snoke preserved and allowed me to read, and even then, I can’t use it like they did—at most, I can see for a few miles.” The more he talked, the more he shone, animated with that vivid, _alive_ glow that always kindled within a person revelling in speaking of their passion, but it faded as he hedged, “I’d understand if you’d prefer that I teach you something else—”

“No,” Rey broke in before he could finish, taking an automatic step closer, “I _want_ you to show me. Luke keeps telling me not to fear the Dark; that it’s there inside each and every one of us. But—aren’t _you_ afraid? To use it again?”

Lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug, he replied, his tone almost matter-of-fact, “I still sometimes think of myself as a monster, if that’s what you’re asking.” He’d looked beyond the surface of her words and seen the meanings that had shaped them: _you wear your guilt like a chain around your neck; I’m scared that you’ll do this and find a reason to hate yourself more._ “Though it comes less and less now, and some days, it doesn’t cross my mind at all.” A hint of a smile tugged at his lips. “If it’s what you want, I’m willing to try it.”

“All right.” Meeting his gaze, she answered him with a smile of her own, imbuing it with a playful dash of challenge. “Go ahead and teach me.”

Two fluttery heartbeats—one racing in her chest, its silver twin pounding behind Ben’s ribs—flitted by, and then he asked, “Would you close your eyes?”

She did at once, remembering a different time in the same forest. Only a couple of weeks had passed since she’d stood before him and asked him to give her memories back, but it felt to her as though she’d changed beyond return, like she’d been a pale shadow-girl suddenly granted colour with which to fill herself in. He’d been as hesitant then as he was now, knowing that he was asking her to put all of her trust in him, but even that wary, desert-roughened part of her had handed it to him without feeling so much as a shard of fear.

Amidst the whispering of the wind, each note of each bird’s call became so distinct that Rey could pick out a sparrow’s trill from skylark-song, and loudest of all, she heard the crunch of fallen autumn leaves under Ben’s boots as he approached. A pair of big hands settled on her shoulders as if to anchor her, overwhelming her with his winter-and-spice scent and heat—he was always so _warm,_ warmer than she’d ever imagined a human could be. If she looked further, peering into the Force, she’d see them, two blazing beacons of silver and gold surrounded by a kaleidoscope of pulsing, _living_ beings, bound to one another and to each creature and person by thousands of cobweb-fine threads.

While the others were attached solely to her heart, quivering to the rhythm of both its beats and theirs, hers and Ben’s silver-gold threads were also looped around their littlest fingers. It reminded her of an old myth from around Jakku’s campfires, but to think of its story with him so near would set her cheeks aflame.

“Think of somewhere,” he told her. “Visualise it in as much detail as you can, then focus—focus on how it sounds, how it smells, what the ground feels like beneath your feet. Now take yourself there.”

_The hangar,_ Rey thought, for it was the first place on Alinor that had occurred to her, and in the space between an inhale and an exhale, she _was_ there. Before her stood rows upon rows of ships: she spotted the _Falcon_ at once, and at either side of it were the _Starbird_ and the _Mirrorbright;_ her eager eyes roved to recognise more, remembering how Jess had introduced her to each, from the _Tipsy Tauntaun_ to the _Kitehawk_ to Jess’ favourite, the _Erso._ An arm’s length away from her, a pilot with grease smeared up to her elbows lay tinkering with the belly of an X-wing, snorting with laughter at a bawdy joke told by one of Poe’s many friends. She smelled fuel and ozone, pine sap and the forest’s fire-hued carpet of leaves, and when she took an experimental step forward, sure that her footfalls would echo against the ferrocrete ground, a twig cracked beneath her toes instead.

“I see what you see,” Ben said in a voice husky with awe, leaning close to her ear as if his words were a secret meant for her alone. For a fragment of a second, an image of him flickered in her mind, more real than the hangar around her: he looked content, almost, his dark-lashed eyes shut and his lips on the verge of curving up. “They don’t know that you’re there,” he reassured her. “You’re a shadow. You’re _air.”_

“This is…” she breathed, and couldn’t help but trail off, finding nothing that could put into words the wonder glowing within her like a lit candle nestled against her breastbone. With another single thought, she pictured herself at the lakeshore, beaming at the sight of glass-winged dragonflies and sun-hit mountains and a shoal of fish shivering just beneath the surface of the clear water, and then—simply because she _could—_ she aimed higher. At the summit of the tallest mountain with its not-quite-there wind blowing against her, all of Alinor lay before her, the clouds below pillow-soft and thick enough to catch her should she fall—but with Ben right behind her physical body, watching through eyes that weren’t his, she _knew_ that she was safe.

How could an ability so incredible be a creation of the Dark Side?

Rey tipped up her chin to bask in the white-gold sunshine pouring down onto her and made herself shuck off all thoughts of the Dark and the Light. The power belonged to the Force, like her, like every animal, every _tree—_

_—_ and then, in the time it took to blink, Ben’s nova-bright silver was snatched away and she couldn’t sense him, or the forest, and she told herself to open her eyes but couldn’t see anything besides darkness that roared up and crashed over her like a drowning wave—

“Ben?” she tried to call out. A dizzying rush of panic distorted her speech so that she had to scramble to arrange it into words, but she managed to quaver, “I—I can’t feel you—”

_Rey?_ came his urgent reply, but it sounded so far away, like somebody had put up a barrier as strong as stone between them. _Rey, what—_

As though from nowhere, the dark walls of a vast, cold hall boxed her in. Ice seeped down the column of her spine, freezing her from the inside out: she’d been there before, in the dreams that had Ben kicking and writhing until he lurched awake, drenched in a chill sweat. She remembered the blade-sharp thorns on the vines that wove their way across the ground, snaking up the plinths of crumbling statues carved to resemble cruel, dead men; the craggy throne and the pale fingers that clenched around the armrests; and the ghost-blue eyes that stared down at her, void of even an inkling of mercy. One hand, its wrist sapling-thin, rose up and beckoned.

_Come, girl. Everything you’ve ever wanted, I can give to you._

The soles of her boots scuffed against the stone floor as her body _moved_ on its own, dragged towards him so easily that she might as well have been made of paper. _Get out,_ she cried, pushing at his looming presence with all the strength braided into her bones and every last iota of energy humming in her bloodstream, though her head burned with a blinding ache and her throat seared with each panted breath, as if she were screaming herself raw in the real world. _Get out, get out, get_ out!

_Rey,_ Snoke tried again. Just the sound of him speaking her name—all that she had left of her home, her _parents—_ was enough to send every one of her nerves jangling haywire, the way they had in the dunes a split-second before somebody crept from the shadows of a downed ship, makeshift weapon at the ready, to try and yank her salvage from her iron grip. _Dear child, I know that you’ve been yearning for answers,_ he continued, his tone a mockery of sympathy. _I know that you’ve been so alone for so long. Wouldn’t you like the kind of power that I could offer you? If you’d allow me, I could help you_ become _somebody. I could help you tear apart those who wronged you on Jakku._

_I’ll never accept_ anything _of yours,_ Rey gritted out. She’d once gone without water from one sunrise to the next, and she’d lived through days on end with no food or sleep, but the act of resisting him—of fighting to wake up; of struggling to wrestle him out of her mind—was taking her body far past its limits. It would give out soon, she knew, but she _couldn’t_ let it. Still reaching for Ben, she clawed for Alinor, for Finn, Poe, Jess, Luke, Leia—

She fell—or, at least, she thought she might have fallen: a distant impact jolted her bones, and her cheek pressed against cool earth. Vaguely, she felt frantic, searching hands rolling her over and holding her tight, and then she felt nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

He’d just… _lost_ her.

One moment, Ben had been watching the world through Rey’s eyes, luxuriating in the sheer joy that spilled like warm honey into the bond as she delighted in everything: how it felt to move, soft as a shadow, through the hangar and the woods; the barest whisper of crisp mountain air stirring her hair; and the sight of all of Alinor spread out before her like a green-and-blue patchwork quilt. For years, he hadn’t permitted himself even the simplest of pleasures, and now, he was at once getting to relearn them and experience _her_ glee at discovering them for the first time.

But the next moment, he’d been thrown out of her mind with enough force to make a galaxy’s worth of stars pop in his field of view. When they’d cleared, the bond had been silent and her eyes wide open and blank. Not terror-blank or death-blank, but _empty,_ as though all that was _Rey_ in her had been shoved aside. Her pupils had almost swallowed her irises whole, and her lips had shaped his name—a small, frightened plea that would no doubt weave itself into his nightmares—and then she’d started to scream, and scream, and scream. In the Force, he’d felt Snoke’s lightless presence and the faint ember-flicker of her fighting to break free, but with the gossamer threads between them still as if… as if _severed,_ he’d never been so helpless in his life.

When Snoke had hurt him, whether it was under the guise of training him to be _betterstrongerworthier_ or to punish him for some real or imagined transgression, he had endured. Ben knew himself, and he knew that he could bear whatever had been asked of him—after all, the physical wounds would either heal or scar and fade, and often, he’d dared take a sliver of solace in the fact that the pain was his and his alone to stand. He hadn’t even let himself cry out when the slice bisecting his face had been knitting itself together, or when all sensation had surged like wildfire back into his newly-repaired arm.

And yet, when Rey dropped to the ground before him, an animal yell ripped itself from his throat.

_Not her_ was the only coherent thought that would come to him as he fell to his knees and grabbed for her, as if part of him hoped to hold her and anchor her to him instead of wherever Snoke was trying to pull her. _You can have me, if that’s what you want. You’ve already done all that you can to me._ With as much gentleness as he could muster in the haze of panic tunnelling his vision until she was all that remained in the universe, Ben turned her over: her face was sheet-white, her dustings of freckles stark little constellations in contrast, and where she’d hit the ground, her cheek was marked with a criss-cross of scratches. _But not her. You can’t have her._

_“Rey,”_ he heard himself beg. Beneath the pads of his searching fingers, her weak pulse fluttered like a moth’s wings, beating against his skin as though trapped. “Rey, _please,_ wake up.” He scooped her up into his arms, as he had in a different forest a lifetime ago. The bond gave a feeble shiver, filaments of spun gold reaching for him, but her eyes stayed shut and her head slumped against his shoulder. Shaking so violently that he feared he might lose his grip on her, he staggered upright, and until the storm in his mind calmed enough to allow him to call out for Luke, all that he could repeat into her hair was a cracked, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Often, after each day’s training session, he was so absorbed in _Rey—_ and how, before they went their separate ways, she walked beside him and talked to him like a friend—that it felt like the trek from the heart of the forest to the base came and went in a matter of seconds. Now, cradling her limp body close to his chest and running so fast that his wind-whipped eyes streamed and his lungs were set alight anew with every breath, he was sure that hours had passed by the time he crashed through the doors.

The very instant he tore through them and into the blessedly quiet building, Luke arrived. Upon seeing Ben’s stricken face and Rey motionless in his arms, whatever he’d been about to say died before it could leave his lips.

“Medbay,” tumbled from Ben’s tongue, the thought half-formed. “Where—Where’s the medbay here?”

His uncle’s mouth opened and then closed as he tried to make sense of what he saw. “Ben,” Luke managed at last, the word coming out hoarse and strange. “What _happened_ to her?”

A dark, sharp-toothed voice snaked around the whorls of Ben’s ears to murmur _monster, he thinks you did it, he thinks_ you _hurt her,_ but he shook his head and bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted a metallic tang, forcing his thoughts in any other direction. The truth felt almost too awful to speak aloud, as though giving it voice would make it more real. “Snoke,” he said, scouring Luke’s summer-blue eyes for even a glimmer of belief and finding it there. “He tried to—to get to her, and I—I couldn’t feel her, I couldn’t—” He focused on the weight of her, the living warmth of her, and the grass-and-vanilla scent of her, then tried again. “It was like she’d… gone,” he whispered. “From the bond. From the _Force._ Is she—is she going to be all right?”

Luke seemed to steel himself, clenching his jaw in preparation for the worst, then approached. He laid his flesh-and-blood hand on Rey’s sweat-damp forehead, and as he slipped his eyes shut to concentrate, Ben’s gaze was drawn to his trembling fingers. _He loves her,_ he realised, _the way fathers are supposed to love their daughters,_ and in spite of everything, the thought swelled his heart. “She’ll be all right,” Luke said after a long moment, his voice gravelly. “The stress of fighting him off must have been too much for her body to handle.” Glancing up at Ben, he chanced a pale smile. “She just needs to rest, that’s all. Let’s get her to her room, shall we?”

Ben nodded and gulped down the lump blocking his throat, _wrongness_ settling like a stone in the pit of his stomach. On Nysa, she’d been a comet condensed into the shape of a tiny girl, and even as an adult, there was more life in her than he’d thought it possible for one person to hold. To have her be so still—so _fragile_ when she was anything but—felt unnatural. _She’ll be all right,_ he repeated to himself with each hurried stride, turning it over and over like a mantra. _She_ will _be all right._

They rounded a corner, and at once somebody’s footsteps screeched to a sudden halt. A familiar voice shouted her name, the short syllable full to bursting with the same fear that had driven him to his knees before her in the forest. Before either Ben or Luke could react, Finn raced up to them, stopped dead about a metre away, and stood in their path with worry fever-bright in his eyes and accusation balled into his fists. “Rey… what?” he breathed, his panicked gaze lingering on the steady rise and fall of her chest. “What’s going on? Why isn’t she moving?”

“She’s fine, Finn, just sleeping,” Luke reassured him. His voice was bone-weary, but his words were gentler than Ben thought he’d be capable of if he were to try to speak: _his,_ he knew, would be razor-edged and jagged with tension until Rey awoke, and perhaps not even then. “Come with us, if you’d like, and we’ll explain there.”

Finn fell into step with them in silence, but Ben could almost _hear_ the electric hum of questions jostling on the tip of his tongue—there were so many that they could have filled him, heel to crown—and as they walked, grit his teeth and cursed himself. If he’d had any common sense whatsoever, he’d have instead passed Rey into Luke’s arms and allowed his uncle to take her to her room while he returned to his alone. Nobody else was around to bear witness, but if they were, they’d see him carrying her and echo Finn’s suspicions in their hundreds; they’d drown him in a torrent of _I knew it_ and _he was bound to snap one day_ and _that poor girl, she ought to have stayed away from him,_ and he wouldn’t have it in him to resurface.

Ben shook his head again and unlocked Rey’s door with a practised twitch of his fingers and a suggestion of the Force, trying to ignore the sear of Finn’s distrustful gaze at the nape of his neck. He strode into her room, noticing that she’d smoothed down the two imprints they’d left on her pillow, and stooped to lay her on the bed. After he backed away, she let out a low moan in her sleep, and as if in answer, Finn flew to sit beside her, then brushed a smudge of dirt from her sore cheek, his dark eyes hardening at the sight of the scratches.

As Ben made himself look away from the easy tenderness that Finn showed towards her, the most minute of movements caught his eye. Maybe he’d succumbed to a bout of madness, but he could have sworn that the flowers on her windowsill had shifted in their glasses as though to watch over her—and that her fluorescent orange blossoms had dimmed, though their light had never gone out before.

“Okay, I’m gonna need some answers,” Finn demanded, fixing Ben with a glare. “She disappears into the forest with you every kriffing day, Organa, and I thought you were—I thought she’d be _safe,_ but now you bring her back in this state? What in the nine hells _happened_ to her?”

Before Ben could unravel his thoughts enough to give a response, Luke jumped in. “Part of me was afraid that something like this might happen,” he said, so quietly that Ben had to strain to hear him over the roaring in his head, “but I thought—” Guilt thickened his voice and sagged his shoulders, “—I _hoped_ that he’d only direct his attention to Ben, since I was shielding him so thoroughly that whatever Snoke _did_ get through to him would be far weaker than usual, and I didn’t think…” He broke off, letting his words trail away to nothing, then locked eyes with Finn. “Rey’s powerful,” he told him, firmer now. “She’s so powerful that Snoke might have decided to try to sway her, if he couldn’t get to Ben. I ought to have tried harder to keep _her_ safe, too.”

“No,” Ben blurted out, surprising himself with the force of it. “Please—teach me how to protect her.”

Luke took him in, regarding him as if searching for something in the very core of him, then gave a tight little nod. “Reach out into the Force,” he said, “and look for her.” Ben closed his eyes and found Rey in an instant—though he would have known the feel of her anywhere and in any life—and once he had, Luke continued softly, “Think of how much you want to protect her and picture that desire becoming a literal shield around her. Imagine it growing stronger and stronger, until there’s not a being in the galaxy who could break through.”

In the world beyond theirs that was both real and not, Ben saw himself encircled by a glimmering field as blue as cornflowers—Luke’s, he knew, for as Rey felt like summer, all sunshine and green and golden things, it was made from what he’d always associated with his uncle: birdsong, binary starlight, and a curious mixture of hope and sorrow that ran deep in his veins.

_I would allow each and every one of the systems to go up in flames before I would allow him to hurt you,_ he whispered to her across the bond, and imagined silver energy pooling like moonlit water in his palms and flowing outwards to wrap around her.

“That ought to be enough,” Luke told him, drawing him back to reality, and then gave the two of them a sad, tired smile. “I’ll—I’ll leave you both with her.”

The door slid shut behind him, and as the sound of his footsteps ebbed away, Ben’s heart sank with the realisation that if he were a better man, he’d call out for Luke to wait and tell him not to blame himself. Instead, he stood waist-deep in his own guilt, hovering in the middle of Rey’s room like a spectre while Finn sat on the edge of her bed with the confidence of a man certain that he belonged there. After all, _Finn_ was Rey’s friend. Soon, Finn would tell the rest of her friends what had happened so that they could all pile in to surround her, and she’d awaken to _their_ concerned faces and be pulled into _their_ relieved arms, the people she’d give everything to protect. He had no place there.

Without a word, Ben made a tiny gesture to begin opening the door, all the while unable to tear his gaze from the way Rey’s eyelashes fanned over her cheeks. Hearing the clicking of the machinery inside, Finn looked up. “You’re leaving?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.

“This is my fault,” Ben replied, bitterness coating his words. “I have no right to be here.”

“Hold it,” Finn said, and Ben’s hand stilled. “Look, I’ll admit that I know next to nothing about the Force and this Snoke creep other than what Rey’s told me, and I’ll bet that there’s a whole lot more that even _she_ doesn’t know. But I don’t see how this could possibly be your fault—Snoke did this to her, didn’t he, not you?”

“It’s _because_ of me that Snoke wants her,” Ben insisted, though distantly, awareness that Finn had spoken the truth niggled at him. Shoving it away, he carried on in a rush, “Luke said as much himself: Snoke can’t get to me, so he’s turning to her, and if I hadn’t spent so much time with her, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to try to exploit her. That’s what he _does._ He learns what makes you weak—what you can’t bear the thought of losing—and he uses it against you.” His voice hitched; his nerves were tightrope-taut, and his breathing had sped up enough that he had to stop and drag in a lengthy, steadying inhale through his nose. “First, it was Ha—my father, and then he tried to hurt my mother. Now, he’s going after Rey, and as long as I’m here, she isn’t safe.”

Finn frowned. “No offence, Organa, but that sounds like a big pile of bantha dung to me.” Before Ben could bristle, he went on, “If Snoke wanted her, he’d try it no matter where you were. You could be all the way over in Hutt Space—or she could still be digging through old wrecks on Jakku—and it wouldn’t stop him from reaching for her.” As he looked back at Rey and studied her, his demeanour softened, a bittersweet twist tugging at the corner of his mouth: sleep brought a vulnerability to her features that she’d have been loath to show them were she awake. It made her seem far younger— _too_ young, both to have lost so much and to have had to fight to survive. “You… really care about her, don’t you?” he murmured.

Lost for words, Ben could only press his lips into a thin line and nod.

“Then stay,” Finn said, offering him a tentative half-smile. “For her. I haven’t known her for very long, but she was one of my first friends, and even then, I could see how afraid she is of losing the people important to her—of them one day deciding to just abandon her. She does the Rey thing and pretends that everything’s fine and that she isn’t scared, but it’s there, and… well, I won’t lie and tell you that I’m not still wary, but it’s obvious to me that she wants you here.” Slipping off the bed, he stood, opened the door, and paused at the threshold, looking like he’d been about to say something significant but had thought better of it at the last second. “I’ve got to go and train the new recruits, but I’ll be back in an hour or so, all right?”

At that, Finn left, and for a moment, all that Ben could do was watch him go, stunned speechless: he’d once come a hairsbreadth from slashing the man’s spine apart, and yet, though he’d hunted for it, he hadn’t found even a trace of hatred in his eyes. Slowly, as though caught somewhere between sleep and waking, he made his way over to Rey’s bed and dipped into the bond, seeking the foggy shapes of her dreams. There were none, but her head was full of a cosy, cared-for kind of warmth, and in the Force, she was _Rey_ again, her signature restored to its usual brilliant dune-gold.

He knelt beside the bed and clutched at her hand, leaning his forehead against it and blinking back the hotness that had all of a sudden sprung to his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” Ben whispered, and it was as if a dam somewhere inside him had burst. Safe in the knowledge that she couldn’t hear, words he’d kept locked away behind his teeth and tucked into the chambers of his heart like secrets all came flowing out. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. For him to get to you. For me to—to—” His voice failed him, and what he was able to say next came out fractured and croaky. “To care for you so much. I didn’t think I was capable of… of being as strong as you make me feel, but so vulnerable it _hurts,_ too, because I don’t know what I’d do if I—” _Lost you again,_ he meant to finish, but his throat closed up at the mere thought.

Rey curled towards him in her sleep, letting out a drowsy mumble that might have been his name. Ben froze and waited, not daring to move. A part of him wondered what would happen if he gave in at last and spoke aloud the undeniable feeling that glowed behind his ribs like a wishing-lantern, or if he surrendered to his longing and held her. Or if he sat by her side and smoothed out the tangles in her hair—but he was all too aware of what that had meant on Alderaan, and what he’d be admitting if he did.

Back when Leia Organa’s home had been more than an ache in her chest, brushing the hair of another had been an act so special that, with the exception of personal attendant droids, it had been reserved for parents towards their children, children towards their parents, and lovers. His mother had left out the detail when she’d talked of Alderaanian customs, but he’d once read that as a bride would teach her family’s traditional braids to her spouse on their wedding night, letting them unravel the silken ribbons woven into her hair and style it afresh, a new partner might gently finger-comb his or her female partner’s mussed-up hair after the first time they made love, and this small gesture had been considered just as—or perhaps even _more,_ depending on the couple—intimate.

Sitting and devoting his time to coaxing each tousle out of Rey’s nut-brown tresses as she slept would, he knew, be as good as announcing _I love you_ to the quiet room.

Because he _did._ He loved her, and it frightened him for reasons that eluded even him.

She stayed asleep for most of the day, slumbering on past lunchtime and past the evening meal. As promised, after about an hour had ticked by, he felt Finn approaching, now joined by several more firefly-bright flares of life. Ben jerked up and hurried to leave as soon as he identified them, and though he didn’t chance returning until he was sure that they’d gone, his mind remained with her, putting all that he could of himself into the shield around her. It might have been cowardly of him, but while he could handle Finn and Jessika Pava, he couldn’t bring himself to face the other two.

Poe Dameron, whose mind he’d ransacked, and who doubtless still saw a black-and-silver mask looming over him in the worst of his nightmares. Poe, who’d flashed his six-year-old self a wide, carefree beam and told him, with the kind of absolute certainty that only children could possess, that when he grew up, he’d have his own X-wing like his mother’s and Ben could be his co-pilot, if he wanted.

Chewbacca, whose best friend he’d murdered. Chewbacca, who—once upon a time—he’d called _Uncle Chewie,_ and who’d dubbed him _Little Ben,_ growling out a laugh whenever he’d stand on his tiptoes and respond, indignant, _but I’m not little anymore, look!_

It wasn’t until the sun was setting that Ben flicked his eyes up from one of his holobooks to see Rey beginning to stir, the sight flooding him with such _relief_ that he could have smiled from ear to ear. He thought of how she’d sought him out to offer him food when he’d skipped his meals, and how he’d hoped against all rational hope that there had been a message in it, and before he knew it, he’d stood up, stolen out of the door, and started to stride down the corridors, an idea taking root and sprouting leaves.

 

* * *

 

Sleep lifted from her eyes like a heavy shimmersilk veil, and with a quickness learned from the dunes, Rey ignored her protesting muscles and pushed herself up onto the points of her elbows. Wincing against the brightness soaking her quarters, she rubbed at her temples—kriff, her head _ached—_ and peered out of the window to reorient herself, hazily remembering sparring with Ben in pale mid-morning autumn sunshine. Now, the clouds were wispy and streaked with fireglow, the light as golden and thick as syrup, and just before she could suck in a sharp, panicked breath at having _lost_ almost an entire day, everything came rushing back to her all at once.

The glacier-chill of Snoke’s presence leaching into her and cutting her off from all that was warm and _good_ in the galaxy, and how desperately she’d searched the all-consuming blackness for a chink of light to seize with both hands and set herself free.

A vague half-memory of a trembling hand laid across her brow, and Luke’s signature in the Force, a maelstrom of the kind of fear that she’d only felt from him once, when he’d knelt before Ben in the pouring rain on Elan.

Finn’s voice, tight with that same fear, and the comforting weight of him by her side.

When she remembered the sensation of her hand clasped in another as if it were a precious thing, she knew without room for doubt—the way she knew that she’d been born by the sea—that Ben had stayed with her, refusing to leave her for any more than an hour while her friends gathered around her bed. An impression swam before her eyes, foggy like a fever dream: Ben arranging his long legs so that he could sit beside her, then trying to skim through a holobook but getting distracted by the rise and fall of her breathing, as though he needed to keep making sure that she was still with him—and something about _that_ and the unexpected sweetness in it had her heart growing a pair of hummingbird-sized wings.

Curious as to where he was if not waiting for her to wake up, Rey reached out, and when she did, the tiny bird’s wings in her chest fluttered all the more. He was _shielding_ her; he’d surrounded her very being with a field of energy, silver as a winter’s moon and as fine as spun smoke. It had to be exhausting—and all for her, no less—but before she could mull over what it might mean, a _knock-knock-knock_ at the door and a rabbit-jump skip in the bond jarred her out of her thoughts.

Self-conscious all of a sudden, even though he’d awoken beside her each morning for the past two weeks and hadn’t seemed to care if her hair stuck up or if her eyes were bleary, she sat upright and ran her fingers through her untidy mane until it was as neat as she could get it. At last, her throat raw and her voice sleep-rough, she called, “Come in!”

Her door opened with a hiss and Ben stepped inside, carrying a covered tray and looking very much like he didn’t know what to do with himself. “Hey,” he said softly, shutting the door behind him. “How are you feeling?”

“Like an AT-AT moonwalked over my head,” Rey answered with a twitch of a smile. “But I’ll live.”

A palpable wave of relief rocked the threads weaving between them, washing away the tension that had been strung fit to fray beneath his skin. “That’s—That’s good,” he replied, returning her smile, then walked over and placed the tray on her nightstand. “You slept for so long that you missed two meals, and I thought you might be hungry, so I brought something small for you to eat.” With an anxious sweep of his hand through his hair, he added haltingly, “It’s… well, it isn’t fine cuisine, but most of the kitchen droids had stopped cooking and this was all that I could do.”

If she hadn’t spent so many evenings listening to the gossip around Jakku’s campfires, Rey might have thanked him for his thoughtfulness but told him that she already had an array of nutrition bars stuffed in her satchel, the drawers of her nightstand, and even in the cupboards of the _Falcon’_ s galley, all just-in-cases that had been driven into her by the desert and the memory of hunger too keen to bear. But she—the girl who’d wrapped her arms tight around herself in her makeshift hammock to soothe the hollowness inside her, sick with yearning for both a full belly and a full heart—couldn’t keep herself from moving to take the lid off the tray, all the while praying that the bond wouldn’t betray the too-quick tempo of her pulse.

Of course, she had to remind herself, there was no way that he understood the significance of what he was doing, or what she’d done when she’d sought him out by the lake and passed him a sandwich, one that—by some magic beyond her grasp—she’d _felt_ had been his favourite. Knowing him, he would have assumed that she’d travelled so far to bring him food because she was worried about him, but in the way of scavengers, she’d told him any number of secret things when she’d offered it to him. Had he been a dune-dweller, his acceptance would have meant something; it would have been an acceptance of _her._ But what if, in true Ben fashion, he’d guessed or made a point to learn? What if he’d come to her with a meal not to say _you didn’t get to eat and I don’t want you to have to go hungry again,_ but to tell her _I have feelings for you, too?_

Rey suppressed a huff of laughter at the thought and uncovered the tray. Here, it was just a kind gesture and nothing more, but in a past life, it had meant _I want to be with you._

Unbidden, a gasp escaped from her lips. In front of her was a feast of the sorts of foods that she could only ever have _dreamed_ of on Jakku, dizzy with hunger as she trudged past the myriad-hued merchant tents, where the mouth-watering scents of their cooking—fresh loaves and meats flavoured with fragrant spices from all over the galaxy—had almost tempted her to sneak in and steal a morsel.

On a patterned plate was a selection of sandwiches hand-cut into bite-sized triangles, made from fluffy white bread and filled with fine-sliced cheeses, meats, and lush leafy vegetables. Beside it, curls of steam spiralled from a bowl of thick, creamy soup. He’d given her _desserts,_ too, as if what she’d already seen hadn’t been plucked straight from her best daydreams: a fruit—or what she presumed was a fruit—that was a perfect ruby-red sphere, and a little cake with snow-soft icing and a glazed bauble of a berry resting atop it, looking too impossibly delicious for her to eat. To top it off, he’d even included a small flask, and its lid unscrewed to reveal a hot, frothy liquid that smelled _divine._

“What’s this?” she asked once she’d regained the ability to speak.

“You’ve never had it before?” Ben raised his eyebrows, then broke into a smile. “Try it and you’ll see.”

Her first experimental sip tasted so wonderful that she couldn’t hold in a groan of pleasure, and nor could she quell her grin as she breathed, “It’s _chocolate.”_

_“Hot_ chocolate,” he corrected her. “When I was young, I’d often have bad dreams. My mother would make it for me after the worst ones, and we’d sit in the kitchen and I’d drink it and watch the stars out of the window until I felt safe enough to go back to sleep.” For a moment, his eyes shone bright and wistful, and only she could have picked up on how he gave his head the most minute shake, as though refusing to allow his regret to rear up and swallow him. “You might think this is good, but _hers_ was incredible. She’d squirt whipped cream on top and sprinkle it with ground-up chocolate. Maybe—Maybe I can show you, one day,” he hedged.

“I’d like that,” Rey told him around a mouthful of sandwich, though privately, she hated that she had nothing from her own childhood to offer him. A girl born somewhere that smelled of warm bread and ocean breezes ought to know its recipes by rote—fish dishes to rival what Ahch-To had taught Luke and all kinds of loaves, ones baked with seeds and herbs and fruits and daubed with honeys and jams and washes of egg—but she’d lost them, and if anything remained of her home, she doubted that they’d be amongst what was left. “Ben,” she murmured, “if the kitchen droids have stopped cooking, how did you get all of this stuff?”

“Being the general’s son has its perks, apparently,” he answered with a wry shrug of his shoulders. “That, and they somehow managed to figure out that all of this was meant for you.” His lips curved up into a smile that struck her—unlikely as it sounded—as _fond._ “They like you. One of them near enough shoved that bloodruby into my hands.”

“Is that what that thing’s called?” She gestured at the fruit. “A bloodruby?”

Ben nodded. “Yes, but you’re not supposed to bite into it the way you would an apple. Once you’ve eaten the rest, I’ll show you how to cut it.”

She hadn’t realised how hungry she’d been until the first bite had touched her tongue, and after that, she had to restrain herself from devouring the whole lot in a matter of seconds. As she ate, the little scavenger voice always at the back of her mind carefully weighed up the bread, the cheeses, the meats, the cake, and the hot chocolate, trying as hard as it could to calculate just how much scrap it would take before she earned enough to be able to trade for them. It went dead silent once it dawned on her that she didn’t know the answer, and nor could she even begin to fathom it.

Rey finished her sandwiches, saving the crusts for last so that she could dip them into the soup. He’d placed cutlery on the tray for her, but she paid no heed to the spoon and instead drank the soup straight from the bowl—and if Ben, the son of a princess, was at all disgusted by the mealtime etiquette of a girl who’d grown up as nobody’s daughter, it didn’t show in his smile. Next, she pulled the berry from the cake and popped it in her mouth, closing her eyes to savour the sweet-sharp burst of flavour. A not-insignificant part of her wanted to take her time and lick away the icing, but she halved the cake and pushed a piece into Ben’s hands, and didn’t relent until he finally gave in and agreed to try some. Just one swallow of the hot chocolate made her feel so warm and so impossibly _loved_ that a different sort of heat burned in her eyes, and she hastened to blink it away before he noticed.

Bad manners were one thing, but _tearing up_ because she’d no clue as to what to do with his display of kindness was entirely another and far, far more embarrassing.

When she came to the bloodruby at last, Ben picked it up and, with a quiet _here,_ demonstrated how to open it. He took a knife from the tray and scored deep criss-cross cuts from the top all the way to the bottom, then pried it apart to reveal shining jewel-like seeds as red as wine. “You eat the arils,” he explained, “not the pith. It’s too bitter.”

This time, she used the spoon to scoop up a few seeds, and let out a surprised—and _pleased—_ hum at the sour-but-sweet tang that exploded between her teeth. A dream-fine thread of memory unspooled within her: she’d heard of fruits like these once before, in a spacefarer’s myth that had bewitched everyone who’d gathered around the campfire to listen.

As the story went, an argument between a sky-prince and his father, the sun, had caused a storm that shook the heavens so much that the prince lost his footing and slipped from the clouds. With nowhere else to go until it abated, he’d sought refuge in the woods belonging to the young queen down below. Grateful for her offer of shelter, he’d fallen in love with her, as people did in stories, but his wrathful father had threatened to turn his back on the world and allow it to freeze unless his son returned. The prince had indeed gone home—but not before eating the seeds of a blood-red fruit from the queen’s gardens, forever linking him to her kingdom and ensuring that he was bound by magic to visit his lover again, always in the dark of night while the oblivious sun slept.

Now that she was pleasantly full, a sudden spark of boldness ignited in her chest, and she passed the spoon over to Ben. “Go on,” Rey told him, flashing him an inviting smile. “It might sound surprising, but I don’t often share food, so take advantage while you can.” She regretted her decision as soon as he took a helping: the juice stained his plump lips so red that she had to force herself to look away lest she start to stare. Needing to distract herself from thoughts of what it might be like to kiss that mouth, she took a fortifying sip of hot chocolate and asked, “You’re shielding me, aren’t you?”

He nodded solemnly. “While you were asleep, I made Luke show me how to do it.”

“That’s a lot for one person to shoulder, isn’t it, especially if you’ve never done it before?” Rey frowned and couldn’t stop herself from meeting his eyes. “Teach me, too,” she insisted.

“Soon.” Ben’s eyebrows pinched together, and he sucked in a pained, staccato breath before adding, “Just—Let me do it for now. I can bear it for today.” He didn’t—or _wouldn’t—_ say it out loud, but it was almost too simple for her to snatch it from where it dangled in the air between them: _please, let me protect you, even if it’s only for one day._

“Tomorrow, then. _Please,_ Ben.” A note of desperation had somehow stolen into her voice, borne from the paralysing terror of reaching out—for her friends; for the Force; for the very planet upon which she stood—and instead closing her fingers around nothing but darkness heavy enough to crush her. “I was weak,” she admitted, and as she felt herself crumbling, she was torn between wanting to see his face and knowing that she ought to hide the tears that blurred him at the edges, as if she were viewing him through steamed-up glass. “I fought, but he was too strong, and I—I just _fell._ He thinks I’m an easy target, doesn’t he? That all he has to do is say some pretty words a—and promise me lies and I’ll come running?”

In one quick stride, Ben closed the gap between them and sat beside her on the bed. “Rey,” he murmured, and raised a hand to wipe away a tear clinging to her lower lashes, then cradled her cheek. His fingertips brushed over a patch of soreness there, but before she could so much as flinch, she let out a faint little sigh as a soft blue-white glow bloomed where he touched her and bathed her in a familiar full-body warmth. Her eyes welled up anew: he was so _tender_ with her, it hurt her heart. “Snoke vastly underestimates you,” he said, holding her gaze as though willing his conviction into her. “You’re far stronger than he could ever imagine; more than _you_ could ever imagine.” He worked his mouth and furrowed his brows, as if hunting for the right words. “May I… May I show you?” he ventured. “So that you can see what I see?”

Rey blinked hard, clearing her vision as best as she could, and with a slight hitch to her voice, replied, “All right.”

She tried with all her might to stay calm as he leaned in, his hand still resting on her healed cheek, and ever so gently pressed his forehead against hers and fluttered his eyes shut. Her pulse thundering in her ears, she followed him, and then—

—saw herself through his eyes, tall and bright and beautiful. Rey had thought of herself as many things—clever, resourceful, swift, and above all, a survivor—but never once had she considered herself _beautiful,_ and as she reeled, he let her in without reserve, pouring himself into her and baring his memories to her.

The first memory was the oldest: her, standing over him as he lay on the ice on Boreas. She remembered him from that day, Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber aimed at the hollow of his white throat and his fingers scrambling for purchase on ground as smooth as glass, but _he_ remembered the conflict waging war in her expression and the fire blazing in her eyes.

After that, he took her to the forest, and with a hint of awe, showed her the unassailable kindness in her smile when she—despite the fact that the harsh desert sands should have eroded all the compassion in her—knelt to feed a bird from her palm.

He remembered every detail of how she’d looked in his dream of Naboo, gilded by lantern-light, and the sight of her in the storm with his hooded cape draped over her shoulders, her lashes jewelled with raindrops and his gaze drinking her in, mapping out her freckles like she had the constellations strung up in Jakku’s skies.

While she’d combed those pinprick stars for signs and ships and wished for a home, he’d found a home in _her._

“Ben,” she whispered once she’d slipped back into her own skin, both because she didn’t know what else to say and because nothing felt like it would be enough.

She’d been sure that he’d pull away as soon as he’d proved his point, but he didn’t move. They were so close that their breath mingled, and in the hush that had descended, she could _hear_ how their hearts were pounding against their ribcages in perfect synchrony, as though each was straining at its tether to reach the other. If she wanted, she could lose herself in his honey-dark eyes, or draw back a fraction and count the moles scattered like drops of ink over his cheeks and jaw, or—or _kiss_ him.

All she needed to do was tilt her head a little and inch forwards to press her lips to his and— _oh._ A feeling of blissful _rightness_ suffused through her, as if she’d been meant to kiss him all along, but when she shifted to gauge his reaction, Ben’s eyes were wide, searching hers almost desperately, and a flush of pink had spread to the tips of his ears. It hit her then that she might have made a mistake; that she might have misread _everything_ and ruined what they had together. With a sharp intake of breath, she stiffened, ready to jerk back and babble out an apology, but before she could, his free hand caught one of her own and clutched it tight.

“You kissed me,” he said slowly. “You _kissed_ me,” he repeated with the very beginnings of a wonderstruck smile, as though to make it real by giving it voice, and then he let go of her hand and cupped her other cheek, leaned forwards, and grazed his lips against hers.

Rey had nothing to compare it to, but she knew down to her soul that it was the way a person was _supposed_ to be kissed: with a pair of broad, strong hands holding them, feather-light and reverent, like they were the most important thing in the universe; with the world around them seeming to let out a quiet, contented sigh and falling away; and with the bond between them _singing_ in a thousand voices and none, cresting with a flood of happiness potent enough to make each smile against the mouth of the other. He urged her closer, or she urged _him_ closer, and when everything was silver and winter and warm and he could go no further, she tangled her hands in his waves of hair, skimming the pads of her fingers over the slice-thin indent of his— _her—_ scar.

Part of her expected his kisses to turn fiery-hot; for him to duck his head and kiss an aching trail to her collarbone, but he didn’t ask for anything that she wasn’t yet ready to offer. He was soft and sweet with her, giving a gentle gasp when she took his bottom lip between her teeth and tracing his tongue over the seam of her mouth as though seeking permission, and his mind was a tumult, flitting from one thought to the next: _beautiful-so soft-safe-never end-don’t want to let go-cyar’ika._

“Say that aloud,” she whispered against his mouth.

Ben peppered the corners of her own mouth with kisses. “Cyar’ika,” he whispered back, testing the word, “cyar’ika”, and he returned to her lips and kissed her again and again.

And when they came up for air, cast in the golden glow of the sunset and the dreamy rainbows thrown off by the coloured stones lining the glasses on her windowsill, they were still forehead-to-forehead, and Ben’s eyes were wet, and she was beaming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I've been looking forward to writing this chapter's ending scene since early 2016! 
> 
> Phasma's homeworld of [Parnassos](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Parnassos) is mentioned in Delilah S. Dawson's _Phasma_ novel, but I've invented my own backstories for her and Hux. Hux's father, [Commandant Brendol Hux](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Brendol_Hux), served the Empire and conceived the idea of raising stormtroopers from birth.
> 
> A [Force Shadow](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_shadow) is a mental projection of the user that allows them to see through their shadow's eyes. As Ben tells Rey, tens of thousands of years before canon events, the [Infinite Empire](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Infinite_Empire), or the [Rakata](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rakata), had their [Force Hound](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_Hound) servants use it to hunt down yet more worlds for them to conquer.


End file.
